Agenda

Trevor Gauld is Deputy Commissioner at Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA), where he plays a key role in shaping national skills strategies to meet Australia’s current and future workforce needs. With deep expertise in workforce development, vocational education, and strategic policy, Trevor brings a strong commitment to building a future-ready, inclusive, and skilled economy.

Prior to joining JSA, Trevor served as the National Assistant Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, where he championed the rights of workers and advocated for quality training and apprenticeship pathways. His career began in the electrical industry, working across power distribution, transmission, maintenance, and construction—giving him firsthand insight into the importance of practical skills and lifelong learning.

Trevor has held numerous board directorships and committee roles, providing strategic advice on skills development, worker entitlements, immigration, trade policy, and climate and clean energy initiatives. His collaborative approach has seen him work closely with government, industry, unions, and education providers to drive innovation and improve outcomes for learners and employers alike.

He is a passionate advocate for equity in education, employment and training, and his leadership continues to support JSA’s mission to enhance skills mobility, workforce capability, and economic participation across Australia.

Jim founded ADAPT with a vision to help Australia thrive commercially, now and for the future.  To enable that, Jim leads ADAPT’s mission to connect, inform and equip our local business and tech leaders.

Leading the development of ADAPTs agenda’s and content strategy whilst also advising executive leadership teams from global technology service providers, Jim is uniquely experienced to be the voice of the end-user, the customer and the vendor.

Bringing his deep knowledge of the local market, Jim regularly presents “Know your Customer” webinars and guides the world’s largest vendors with their G-T-M and content strategies.

Through entrepreneurial product development and a servant leader mentality with his team and clients, ADAPT grows annually with clearly differentiated value for all stakeholders.

Dr Amantha Imber is an organisational psychologist and the founder of Inventium, a behavioural science consultancy whose clients include Google, Apple, Disney and Microsoft. She is the two-time winner of AI Consultant of the Year at the Australian AI Awards, in 2025 and 2026.

More than half a million people have used Inventium’s programs to build stronger AI skills and lift their performance at work.

Amantha was the first Australian to win the Thinkers50 Innovation Award, which the Financial Times has described as the “Oscars for Management Thinking”.

She hosts the top-ranking business podcasts How I Work and How I AI, with more than 6 million downloads, where she asks some of the world’s most successful people about their habits and rituals and shares practical AI strategies. Her ideas have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Forbes and Fast Company.

She is the author of five bestselling books, including the international bestseller Time Wise. Her books have been translated into more than 10 languages, and her latest, The Energy Game, is out now.

I have broad corporate experience and expertise and have led teams from different fields including ICT, emerging technology, strategic planning, training design and delivery and project management. I’m an experienced leader in digital transformation and technology strategy and want to contribute to organisations who champion technology to build responsible and sustainable systems for the future. My specialist area is data science and AI strategy, and digital strategy and implementation.  
 
With academic and practitioner experience, comprising humanities, strategy and computer science, I work effectivity across disciplines and with stakeholders to deliver outcomes. I enjoy finding solutions to complex problems and contributing to a range of sectors through entrepreneurship, mentoring and not-for-profit programs. 

Mark is a passionate, committed, and respected technology leader in government with over 25 years of experience leading policy, strategy, data, digital, and technology delivery functions across government.  

Mark currently serves as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer at the Australian Taxation Office. In this role, Mark provides leadership and strategic direction for the broad technology ecosystem, ensuring support for the agency’s tax, super and registry systems in a rapidly changing digital landscape.  He works in close partnership with senior business leaders to ensure that we are taking advantage of the most innovative trends in technology to best support taxpayers, tax agents, ATO staff, and the community. 

Prior to his current role, Mark was the First Assistant Secretary and Chief Information Officer at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, preceded by previous senior executive leadership roles at the Department of Education, Australian Bureau of Statistics, ComSuper, and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

With more than 20 years’ experience helping organisations use data, AI and emerging technologies to drive business transformation. A strong advocate for human-centred design, Angelica believes technology delivers its greatest value when it is built around the needs of people, not just processes. She works with business and technology leaders across government and industry to turn innovation into practical outcomes that are trusted, adopted and scalable. 

Margaret has been part of IP Australia’s leadership team since early 2020 and is currently acting Director General of IP Australia. Her focus is on ensuring that IP Australia has the right capability to deliver on its strategic objectives, and on working collaboratively both domestically and internationally to support effective IP policy development.

Before joining IP Australia, Margaret was A/G First Assistant Secretary of Legal and Compliance in the former Department of Environment and Energy.

Margaret has extensive experience in providing legal and governance advice to government across a range of subject matters including education, industry, science, environment and energy.

Since 2008, she has held Senior Executive roles in the Commonwealth Government.

She was General Counsel of the Department of Industry, Science and Resources from 2012 to 2017 and General Counsel of the then Department of Environment and Energy from 2017 to 2019.

She has a Bachelor of Arts/Laws(Hons) and a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice from the Australian National University. She is also a graduate of the Australia Institute of Company Directors.

Simon is responsible for leading the safe use of AI to support the Department’s mission to protect Australia’s borders, manage immigration, preserve social cohesion, and safeguard national security covering 16,000+ staff. His role includes responsibility for AI capability uplift, delivery of AI use cases, setting strategy, implementing AI policy, assurance and controls working in partnership with business leaders, legal, technology, cyber teams, and a network of AI champions.

Simon has 20 years’+ experience delivering digital, data, AI, and transformation outcomes across government in Australia and the UK working with over 60 agencies. Prior to joining Home Affairs, Simon was a Partner at Deloitte where he led the National Central Government practice and specialised in digital transformation. He spent a decade at the UK’s Home Office having joined as a graduate including leading operational, data and strategy teams. Simon is a recognised thought leader including through co-authoring the book ‘Are we there yet? The Digital Transformation of Government in Australia’ (2019).

Lucy leads the Strategy, Planning and Performance Division which focuses on providing whole-of-government strategic leadership to the development and implementation of digital policies, the Australian Government Architecture as well as the Data and Digital Government Strategy.

In this role, Lucy also oversees the management of the government’s digital investment pipeline to ensure an integrated and coordinated approach to government’s investment in digital and ICT.

A key priority for Lucy is driving the achievement of the Australian Government’s vision to implement world class digital capabilities to deliver outstanding outcomes for all. This includes the analysis of how emerging technologies can better support the delivery of simple, secure and connected services for all people and businesses.

Prior to joining the DTA, Lucy held senior executive roles at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Australian Public Service Commission where she led several transformation programs. Lucy has experience across a range of sectors including Australian federal and state governments, the private sector and the UK civil service.

Peter Hind has spent the last 25 years as an analyst and commentator on the ICT industry. He says his primary areas of interest are the potential of technology to transform the way organisations operate, the change management obstacles executives encounter in realising this potential and the tactics and techniques leaders have deployed to overcome these difficulties.

Peter now takes on multiple roles within ADAPT including the moderation of private events and roundtables, interviewing business executives about the strategies they are pursuing and assisting with the structuring of our delegate surveys and the interrogation and analysis of ADAPT’s treasure trove of end-user and C-level data

Alex is an enterprise leader with a track record of building and integrating complex technology organisations. He’s spent the past two decades helping large enterprises navigate digital transformation, with particular focus on security, risk management, and organisational integration.

Currently, he leads the combined Armis and Veza businesses for ServiceNow. In this role, he’s focused on unifying asset intelligence and cyber risk management capabilities with identity and access security tools, giving organisations automated visibility into their assets, who has access to what, and how to remediate vulnerabilities. His mandate is to help government and enterprise organisations proactively manage cyber risk at scale.

Before joining ServiceNow, Alex built Armis from the ground up into a leading cyber asset intelligence platform. His approach to scaling an organisation emphasises cultural continuity and genuine partnerships with customers.

He works closely with CIOs and security leaders across government and large enterprises, and acts as an adviser to other organisations navigating complex growth and integration challenges. His experience spans new market entry, building partner ecosystems, and helping leadership teams balance innovation with operational stability and strong culture.

Alex believes that sustainable competitive advantage comes from strong people, clear mission, and a genuine commitment to solving customer problems. He brings three decades of pattern recognition on how organisations successfully implement change and build resilience.

Gabby’s primary role is managing ADAPT’s overall strategy for Data Analytics. He has extensive experience in using data to identify trends in technology that help shape Australian organisations. Utilising modern Data Science techniques, he provides ADAPT and their customers with confidence in the accuracy and validity of the information used for ADAPT’s Research, Advisory, and Events.​

With a passion for creating stories with data, Gabby is consistently rated as one of the top speakers at ADAPT Events. In round table discussions, he specialises in using statistics to initiate thought-provoking discussions. Gabby is effective in translating information into insights, enabling ADAPT’s customers to become more data-driven.​

Gabby’s primary areas of expertise are: ​

• Advanced AI and ML practices, including AI ethics.​
• Building models to benchmark and predict IT performance.​
• End-user behaviour and human-centred design.​
• Cross-functional team design and value, such as DevSecOps.​

Jenn Spykerman is a technology transformation leader at MomentumAI, specialising in platform engineering, software delivery modernisation, and AI-enabled organisational transformation. With a background spanning aerospace, defense, and enterprise technology, she has worked on mission-critical programs for NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, bringing systems engineering principles to complex organisational and technology challenges.

Jenn is a co-author of When Agents Decide: Continuous Decision Intelligence and the Substrate Beneath It, which explores how organisations can design trustworthy decision systems as AI agents assume greater autonomy. Her work focuses on connecting technology, human decision-making, and organisational effectiveness to improve outcomes in complex, high-consequence environments.

Angela Fox, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Dell Technologies Australia and New Zealand, is responsible for the sustained business success of the company in both countries. Based in Sydney, Angela leads the strategy and direction of the business while maintaining a commitment to keeping customers at the core of what Dell Technologies does.

Dell Technologies supports customers, public and private, across a wide range of industries, enabling them to digitally transform and remain relevant and competitive, today and in the future. Angela’s team in ANZ brings the best of Dell Technologies’ industry leading portfolio of solutions, technologies and support services to enable local customers to meet their business objectives.

Angela joined Dell in 2006. Her career moved her to Australia then Singapore, where she held executive responsibilities across ANZ and broader Asia Pacific and Japan region. Angela drew on her solutions and services experience to help customers achieve their IT needs through these roles. Under her leadership, her team delivered market leading results to large and medium sized organisations across private and public sectors.

Angela has a passion for people management and is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion. She launched the Dell Technologies Australia and New Zealand Diversity and Inclusion Council and is a founding member of the APJ Diversity and Inclusion Council. Angela plays a pivotal role in driving Dell Technologies cultural initiatives in ANZ through the employee resource groups (ERG) that represent the team’s passion.

Angela is a vocal advocate for career success, believing a person’s adaptability and openness to embrace new challenges are key drivers to progression. Angela is actively involved in career mentoring, advocacy and sponsorship within the company. She leads Dell’s Women in IT Executive Mentoring (DELL WITEM) program and is an executive sponsor for the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN).

Angela graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Zoology from the University of Auckland. However, after joining IBM’s graduate program, she realised her interest in the unfettered possibilities of the digital world, particularly as the internet was rapidly developing.