Agenda

Tuesday, 13 October 2026

“The Human in the Loop & Managing Digital Colleagues”

Please note that 1:1 meetings will be running throughout the day.

07:45 - 08:30

Registration & Check-in

Jim Berry

CEO & Founder at ADAPT

About

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.

08:30 - 08:50

Welcome to the 3rd People & AI Edge: "The Human in the Loop & Managing Digital Colleagues"

Jim Berry - CEO & Founder at ADAPT Read More

The world of work is being rewritten - not gradually, but all at once. Agentic AI is moving from pilot to practice, digital colleagues are entering the workforce, and the people function is being asked to lead a transformation it was never designed for.

In this opening address, ADAPT CEO Jim Berry sets the stakes for the day - why the decisions people leaders make in the next 12 months will define the organisations they work for over the next decade, and why the human in the loop has never mattered more.

Gabby Fredkin

Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT

About

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.​
08:50 - 09:10

What are the Top Performers Doing Differently?

Gabby Fredkin - Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT Read More

The gap between ambition and execution is widening - and the people function sits at the centre of it.

Drawing on ADAPT’s proprietary research across 1000+ Australian C-suite leaders, Gabby Fredkin unpacks what separates the organisations closing that gap from those falling further behind.

What are top performers doing differently on workforce readiness, capability-building, and AI adoption? Where are the hidden bottlenecks - and which of them sit squarely on the CHRO’s desk?

This session gives the room a data-anchored baseline before the day’s conversations begin, so every discussion that follows is grounded in what is actually happening across Australian enterprise - not what the headlines suggest.

09:10 - 09:15

Get an Edge: Making the Most of Your Day

Shannon Barry - Senior Community Success Manager at ADAPT Read More

Catherine Walsh

Chief People Officer at Qantas

About

An accomplished, commercial leader with experience in delivering strong people performance in large, complex businesses. With a background in law, she has moved into leadership roles with iconic Australian businesses with a focus on building great, safe workplaces with talented teams delivering strategic outcomes for the customer.

Dom Price

Work Futurist at Be Luminous

About

Dom Price is a Work Futurist, team obsessive, and Partner at Be Luminous and someone who has lived the chaos of scaling a business from the inside out. Joining Atlassian as employee #600, Dom stayed for 12 years as their resident Work Futurist, helping grow the company to over 16,000 people globally. That’s not theory - that’s scar tissue.

Dom operates at the intersection of tech and humans, and his mission is simple: upgrade the human operating system of how we work. Because as he’ll tell you, “a fool with a tool is still a fool… you’ve just made them faster.” In a world drunk on AI and the next shiny solution, Dom is the pragmatic voice asking whether your people are actually set up to use it well - driving change that’s sustainable, not just spectacular.

As a keynote speaker, Dom doesn’t trade in polished frameworks or borrowed wisdom. He shares real, lived experience the messy, hard-won kind which is exactly why he’s in demand. Less thought leader, more battle-tested practitioner.

Co-creator of the Atlassian Team Playbook, TED speaker, and advisor to C-suite leaders globally. Dom believes that work and life should be about thriving, not just surviving. A keen traveller and veteran of 53+ countries, he calls Australia home. Manchester made him. The rest? Still very much in progress.

09:15 - 09:55

A Fireside Chat with Catherine Walsh, Chief People Officer at Qantas

Catherine Walsh - Chief People Officer at Qantas Dom Price - Work Futurist at Be Luminous Read More

Qantas isn’t just Australia’s national carrier, itt’s part of the national identity. When it flies well, the whole country feels it. When it doesn’t, the whole country hears about it. That’s an extraordinary amount of pressure to place on 27,000 people who show up every single day.

So how do you build a workforce that doesn’t just perform, but genuinely cares? How do you turn brand pride into a retention strategy, a customer experience multiplier, and a cultural backbone that holds under pressure?

Catherine Walsh has spent her career building great workplaces inside complex, high-stakes businesses. Dom Price has spent his obsessing over the human operating system; the how of work, not just the what. Together, they’ll pull apart what it really means to put people first in an organisation where the stakes are sky-high and the expectations are higher.

The conversation will explore:

- Why culture is your most durable competitive advantage. At Qantas, every employee impacts the customer experience. Their culture is on display every hour of every day.
- The link between employee experience and customer experience. You can’t deliver a world-class journey at 35,000 feet if the people behind it don’t feel seen, valued, or set up to succeed.
- Brand pride as a people strategy. What it means to work for an icon and how you sustain that sense of meaning and belonging across a workforce as diverse and distributed as Qantas’s.

Upgrading the human OS. Before you reach for the next tool or platform, are your people actually set up to do their best work? The fundamentals of trust, clarity, and psychological safety never go out of fashion.
Less theory, more truth. This is what great people leadership looks like from the inside.

09:55 - 10:25

Redesigning Workforce Strategy as AI Agents
Take Their Place in Teams

Strategic Insights from Workday

A new kind of worker is joining the workforce. AI agents - not tools, but capabilities that act, decide and contribute alongside people - are beginning to take their place on the team. This profound change in history calls for a redesign: a workforce strategy built entirely around humans now must account for AI Agents and the opportunity/risks it carries.

The people leaders who lean in won’t be managing technology; they’ll be architecting the workforce that comes next.

- When agents become part of the team, how should workforce strategy be redesigned around them?
- What work stays human by design - and who decides?
- How do you set roles, accountability and performance when part of the workforce isn’t human?
- What does onboarding, managing and trusting an agent look like for a people function?
- How do you keep culture and human connection central as agents take their place on the team?

Read More
10:25 - 10:45

Morning Break: Refreshments, Snacks & Connections

Karen Lonergan

Chief People Officer at PwC

About

Karen is PwC Australia’s Chief People Officer and a member of the Management Leadership Team.

Karen is a seasoned enterprise leader with specialist skills in people, culture and transformation, as well as broader experience in customer advocacy, corporate affairs and government relations, reporting to CEOs and boards of major Australian companies.

Karen’s work spans the professional services, real estate, retail and transportation sectors in Australia, Asia, the USA, Europe and Africa. She is passionate about enhancing culture, leadership, employee engagement and performance while positioning organizations for growth and helping them navigate complexity and disruption.

Outside of her business life Karen loves to travel, particularly with her family, and she is a prolific consumer of podcasts across a range of genres.

Consultants are at the bleeding edge of AI … by Jim Berry

Consultants are at the bleeding edge of AI and Agentic impacting their operations - so she has lots of lessons learned to share.

Gabby Fredkin

Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT

About

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.​
10:45 - 11:15

Humans at the Helm: Rethinking Workforce Strategy in the Age of AI

Karen Lonergan - Chief People Officer at PwC Gabby Fredkin - Head of Analytics & Insights at ADAPT Read More

In conversation with ADAPT’s Gabby Fredkin, Karen brings a practitioner’s lens to the most pressing people challenge of the decade - how to lead organisations through AI transformation without losing the human elements that make them work. From workforce architecture to leadership culture, she explores what it takes to build organisations where AI amplifies people rather than replaces them, and where the people function earns its seat at the strategy table.

11:15 - 11:35

More Agents, More Human: Unlocking Your Workforce's Potential

Thought Leader at Cornerstone On Demand

Read More

Automation delivered efficiency; agentic AI unlocks something bigger - people freed for the work only humans can do best. But capacity alone isn’t an advantage. Building capability directly in the flow of work, rather than bolting it on, is what turns daily performance into a scalable strategic asset. This session explores how workforce readiness evolves when AI agents work alongside people, continuously adapting to changing demands and empowering both technology and human leaders to co-own growth that compounds over time.

Discussion points

- Applying agents to routine work, enabling employees to engage in higher-value, human-centric work
- Building capability in the flow of work - readiness that adapts as fast as the work itself
- Co-owned by people and technology leaders - turning readiness into compounding growth

Dan Aherne-McInteer

Senior Manager, APAC Solution Consulting at ServiceNow

About

Dan launched the Moveworks APAC business from zero, partnering with enterprise customers across ANZ and Southeast Asia to build repeatable plays around HR and employee experience transformation. He has spent five years building APAC go-to-market for enterprise SaaS and is now scaling his impact and team across the APAC region as part of ServiceNow. He works with CHROs and IT leaders redesigning operating models to shift HR from processing to strategy - helping them understand what’s possible when you stop treating AI as a project and make it the front door to all your systems.

11:35 - 11:55

Your Operating Model Wasn't Built for Your Workforce

Dan Aherne-McInteer - Senior Manager, APAC Solution Consulting at ServiceNow Read More

Your HR tech works beautifully for those who built it, not those who use it. When a frontline team member needs an answer, they email. Your HR team answers the same question forty times daily. Compliance slides. Change slows.

Every AI rollout follows the same pattern: working groups, integration delays, gatekeepers protecting data silos. Six months later it’s answering questions about the canteen menu while the work that matters still runs on spreadsheets and someone’s memory.

What if you redesigned for the frontline instead? Stop treating AI as a project and make it the front door. One place to ask. Work stays in systems people already own. HR shifts from answering the same question repeatedly to leading change. Workflows that took weeks now build in days. Managers get alerted to problems before they escalate, not after.

Walk away with: a diagnostic for whether your AI is actually valuable or expensive, and how to keep humans central as your operating model evolves.

12:00 - 13:00

ADAPT Executive Insight Roundtables - share with confidence under the Chatham House Rule

Attend your preselected roundtable to participate in a peer discussion moderated by ADAPT analysts with subject matter experts.

Roundtable 1

Designing the Human + AI Workforce

A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with Workday and your peers

Read More

AI agents are moving from tools to teammates - acting, deciding, and contributing alongside people. That changes the workforce equation: who does what, what stays human, and where does accountability sit?

In this moderated discussion, join Ian McCreery, Workday and your peers, to debate how people leaders can design a blended human + agent workforce without losing accountability, culture, or human connection.

Key questions:

- What work stays human?
- How do roles and performance change?
- And how should HR lead the redesign rather than react to it?

Roundtable 2

Building the Empowered Workforce: Moving Beyond Busy Work to Best Work

A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst with ServiceNow and your peers

Read More

Discover how leading organisations are leveraging AI to automate the tasks that drain productivity, freeing managers and employees to drive strategy and innovation. Drive measurable outcomes, without vendor sprawl or governance complexity.

Key Session Takeaways:

- Shift the productivity equation: How eliminating routine work (requests, approvals, onboarding, compliance) creates capacity for strategic initiatives
- Create the AI front door: Why employee experience and AI execution must work together, transforming both employee satisfaction and operational costs
- Help your team thrive: When AI handles tactical work, your team transforms from task managers into strategic leaders.
- AI that gets work done: Stop buying point solutions for every problem. One unified platform respects your policies, knows your business context, and delivers ROI without sprawl. Budget smarter, deliver outcomes faster.

Lisa Drum

Head of Product at ADAPT

About

Executive transformation leader who brings clarity to complex environments and converts strategy into delivery momentum. Experience spans enterprise technology leadership (Microsoft, T-Mobile, public sector) and consulting across Australia / Asia Pac, the US, EU and LATAM. I work with senior leaders to frame decisions, align business and technology priorities, and shape modernisation pathways that are practical, sequenced and measurable. Known for clear thinking, executive facilitation, and translating between commercial intent, technical reality and operational constraint to keep teams aligned and outcomes moving.

Focus areas:

- Business and technology transformation
- Executive facilitation and decision support
- Data and modernisation strategy
- Customer and employee experience uplift
- Cross-functional leadership and coaching
- Turning complexity into clear choices

Roundtable 3

People & AI: Setting the Research Agenda

A boardroom session moderated by Lisa Drum (ADAPT) with Dr Ida Asadi Someh and Dr Stefan Jooss (University of Queensland)

Read More

AI has moved from a technology question to a workforce, governance and national competitiveness one. For senior HR leaders, the decisions being made now about how AI reshapes jobs, skills, leadership and trust will define their organisations for years. This roundtable opens a year-long research partnership between ADAPT and the University of Queensland, built on the MIT CISR community-of-practice model. Rather than present conclusions, it sets the agenda: the room surfaces and prioritises the questions that matter, hears how UQ will ground the work in evidence, and shapes the research the partnership pursues across the year. You will leave as a founding member of the Research Advisory Group, with a clear view of what the year explores and how your organisation compares with your peers.

What we will get into:

- The questions that matter most right now on AI and the workforce, surfaced and prioritised by the leaders in the room.
- Where AI is genuinely changing HR practice, from agentic workforce ownership to skills intelligence and the legitimacy of the function.
- What good evidence looks like, and how practitioner insight and survey benchmarks combine to answer these questions with rigour.

13:00 - 13:55

Peer Networking Seated Lunch

14:00 - 15:00

ADAPT Executive Insight Roundtables - share with confidence under the Chatham House Rule

Attend your preselected roundtable to participate in a peer discussion moderated by ADAPT analysts with subject matter experts.

Roundtable 4

Who Owns the Agentic Workforce?

A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst.

Read More

As agentic AI moves from pilot to production, who is accountable when an autonomous system makes a decision that affects an employee? This closed-door roundtable brings together senior People and workforce leaders to debate ownership, governance and readiness for the agentic workforce, drawing on live benchmark data from the People & AI Edge delegate survey. Expect a frank, peer-led exchange on where accountability sits today (IT, HR, the business, or nobody), what a defensible governance model looks like, and how leading organisations are preparing their people function for this shift.

Roundtable 5

The Leadership Velocity Gap: Upgrading the Operating System for AI

A boardroom session moderated by Andy Foster, Principal and Executive Coach at Clarity Partners and ADAPT Advisor

Read More

There’s no shortage of conversation about the what and the why of AI. There’s far less about the capability that decides if and how any of it lands: leadership. Most agree it matters, but few are stopping to ask what it now needs to become. That’s the velocity gap - technology moving exponentially, leadership and culture still moving in a straight line. This roundtable steps into that gap. Drawing on ADAPT’s Leadership Deficit research with Andy Foster and the live People & AI Edge survey, Andy opens with a short provocation, then hands the room to a peer conversation under Chatham House rules. You’ll leave with a sharper view of the leadership operating system your organisation needs to keep pace - and how yours compares with your peers.

What we will get into:

- Why humans matter more, not less, as AI gets more capable: judgment, trust and discernment.
- Why upskilling isn’t enough: the difference between adding new tools and upgrading the operating system itself.
- Why the most dangerous place to be is high AI ambition sitting on a legacy leadership OS and what closes that gap.
- How you keep leaders and managers sharp when it’s easier to just ask AI, before judgment atrophies

Roundtable 6

Proving the People Value of AI: From Productivity to Performance

A boardroom session moderated by an ADAPT Analyst.

Read More

AI investment is accelerating, but proving workforce value remains difficult. Time saved is not the same as value created and productivity gains do not automatically translate into better business performance.

Debate how CHROs are measuring the real impact of human-AI collaboration: from capacity released and work redesigned to employee performance, customer outcomes and financial value.

What we will get into:

- What should CHROs actually measure beyond adoption and hours saved?
- Where does AI-created capacity go - growth, better work, or simply more work?
- How do you connect workforce redesign to productivity and business performance?
- What evidence will convince the CEO and board that AI investment is creating measurable people and enterprise value?

15:00 - 15:10

Afternoon Break: Refreshments + Snacks

Dr Juliette Tobias-Webb

Australia's Leading Behavioral Scientist and Professor at AI & Cyber Futures Centre

About

Dr Juliette Tobias-Webb is one of Australia’s leading behavioural scientists, helping organisations understand and shape human decision-making in a rapidly changing world.

With a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, she works at the intersection of behavioural science, AI, and emerging technology.

Dr Juliette is an Adjunct Professor at the AI and Cyber Futures Centre and the founder of a behavioural science consultancy working with organisations including Mastercard, Google, Publicis Groupe, Citibank and Atlassian. She has previously held senior behavioural science roles at the Commonwealth Bank and Ogilvy Australia.

Her research is published in leading psychology and neuroscience journals, and her expertise is frequently featured in media such as Triple J Hack, ABC, and The Australian Financial Review.

Dr Juliette has been recognised as one of Australia’s Superstars of STEM and was selected among 100 women in STEM to take part in an Antarctic leadership expedition.

Matt Boon

Senior Research Director at ADAPT

About

As Director of Strategic Research at ADAPT Matt Boon, is responsible for directing and developing ADAPTs research content and positions.

In his role at ADAPT Boon advises C-Suite executives across the end-user and technology provider landscape. Boon is also responsible for bringing together groups of C-Suite leaders to discuss and prepare for the myriad of challenges and opportunities they face.

ADAPT host’s numerous industry leading IT focused events annually and Boon is responsible for hosting, chairing and delivering ADAPT independent content and positions to help attendees make informed IT decisions.

15:15 - 15:45

Panel Discussion | The Human in the Loop: Leading the AI-Augmented Workforce

Dr Juliette Tobias-Webb - Australia's Leading Behavioral Scientist and Professor at AI & Cyber Futures Centre Matt Boon - Senior Research Director at ADAPT

Thought-leader from CBA

Read More

ADAPT sits down with ANZ’s most influential HR and AI leaders go beyond the theory - sharing unfiltered perspectives on what it takes to lead a workforce through the age of intelligent agents, and how the people function itself is being reinvented in the process.

Discussion Points:

- When change is permanent, not episodic - how do you build a workforce that absorbs it as a default?
- When AI adoption outpaces the human operating system, it stalls - so what does genuinely people-led AI transformation look like in practice?
- Agentic AI is already in your workflows - how are you redesigning roles, accountability, and culture without losing momentum?
- HR cannot govern AI alone - what does cross-functional leadership between people, technology, and analytics teams actually look like?
- As digital colleagues and AI agents move from experimentation to low-touch decision-making - who is accountable, and where does the human fit?

David Walker

(former) Group Chief Technology Officer at Westpac & DBS and Chair of the AI Council at UNSW

About

David began his career in 1987 coding enterprise software for ten years. He then founded an ASEAN data science firm and exited after ten years to then spend the next 20 years as an IT executive at ANZ Bank, DBS Bank in Singapore — which became the world’s best bank — and most recently he was the CTO of Westpac Bank. Now he’s the founder of Activate, an organisation helping organisations become future-ready, an adjunct at UNSW where he chairs the AI Institute External Advisory, and an independent director and advisor to start-ups and multinationals.

Gemma Corke

Director of People Function in Australia and New Zealand at McKinsey

About

As the Director of the People Function for Australia and New Zealand, Gemma is passionate about driving organisational renewal and transformation. She is dedicated to nurturing talent, building strong capabilities, and fostering deep workforce engagement across the organisation. 

Drawing on her extensive background in People & Organisational Performance, she brings a wealth of experience working alongside clients where she cocreated programs by piloting and testing new ideas, building ownership, and helping them successfully scale and transform performance, capabilities, and workforce engagement. 

Gemma’s work has included leading capability programs across private- and public-sector organisations, including designing the learning objectives and content, as well as the change management and roll-out plans. She has also developed workforce strategies, including analysing current labour market shortages, understanding current and future workforce needs and existing interventions, and designing the future strategy 

Lisa Drum

Head of Product at ADAPT

About

Executive transformation leader who brings clarity to complex environments and converts strategy into delivery momentum. Experience spans enterprise technology leadership (Microsoft, T-Mobile, public sector) and consulting across Australia / Asia Pac, the US, EU and LATAM. I work with senior leaders to frame decisions, align business and technology priorities, and shape modernisation pathways that are practical, sequenced and measurable. Known for clear thinking, executive facilitation, and translating between commercial intent, technical reality and operational constraint to keep teams aligned and outcomes moving.

Focus areas:

- Business and technology transformation
- Executive facilitation and decision support
- Data and modernisation strategy
- Customer and employee experience uplift
- Cross-functional leadership and coaching
- Turning complexity into clear choices

15:45 - 16:15

The Workforce Question AI Can't Answer Without HR

David Walker - (former) Group Chief Technology Officer at Westpac & DBS and Chair of the AI Council at UNSW Gemma Corke - Director of People Function in Australia and New Zealand at McKinsey Lisa Drum - Head of Product at ADAPT Read More

As agentic AI reshapes work, this panel asks whether HR is ready to co-design the operating model, or risk being left managing the consequences.

- How must you rethink workforce strategy when people, process, and technology converge?
- AI is redefining core workflows and operating models; how must organisations decide where human accountability begins and ends?
- How to build the cross-functional accountability model that AI-era work actually demands - and why the CHRO-CIO alliance is the partnership that makes or breaks it

16:15 - 16:20

Closing Comments

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16:20 - 17:20

People Edge Peer Networking Drinks

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An opportunity to stay, mingle and meet other attendees over drinks and food and discuss the day.

Register your interest

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