AI Infrastructure and Enterprise Systems Summit - Day 1
9:00 am - 9:10 am
Opening Remarks — ANZ AI & Infrastructure State of Play 2026
Chair's opening remarks — data-led benchmark of AI deployment and infrastructure maturity across ANZ enterprises in 2026.
9:10 am - 9:40 am
Leadership Panel | The ANZ infrastructure gap: Why our systems weren’t built for what AI actually demands
Shane Ozartov -
Associate Director AI/GenAI, Enterprise Validation,
NAB
John Khoury - Group Chief Technology Officer, Strand Bags
Most ANZ enterprises built their technology foundations for stability, not speed and now they're trying to run real-time AI workloads on infrastructure designed for batch processing and on-premise data centres. This panel gets honest about the gap between where ANZ infrastructure actually is and where it needs to be, without a five-year transformation programme.
9:40 am - 10:10 am
Partner keynote session
10:10 am - 10:30 am
We ripped out the legacy core and lived to tell the story
A CTO on the modernisation decision that changed everything — what triggered it, what it cost, what nearly killed the project, and what the infrastructure looks like now. Not a vendor success story — a real account of the hardest technology decision a leadership team can make.
10:30 am - 11:00 am
Solution Panel | Build vs buy vs borrow: The platform decisions CIOs are actually making in 2026
Dr Tom Gao -
Chief Technology and Digital Services Officer,
City Of Sydney
Hina Zakir - Head of Technology Enterprise Architecture ERP Data AI Dev Sec Ops, Woolworths Group
Ian Harris - Director of Technology, Platforms and Practices, Nine
Every organisation is navigating the same question — what do you build yourself, what do you buy from a vendor, and what do you consume from a hyperscaler? This panel brings together CIOs and CTOs who have made different bets, made mistakes, and changed their minds. No vendor agenda — just the unfiltered decision-making behind the infrastructure choices that define the next decade.
Hina Zakir
Head of Technology Enterprise Architecture ERP Data AI Dev Sec OpsWoolworths Group
11:00 am - 11:30 am
Morning break + exhibition
Interactive Discussion Groups — Unscripted. Unfiltered. Unmissable.
IDG A
11:30 am - 1:00 pm AI in risk, compliance & fraud detection: what’s working in production and what’s still a promisePractitioners share where AI is genuinely changing risk and fraud outcomes versus where it's added a layer of complexity without the returns. Real implementation gaps, false positive problems, and governance realities that don't make it into vendor case studies.
IDG B
11:30 am - 1:00 pm AI deployment under regulatory constraints: building for compliance without killing the use caseHow do you move AI from pilot to production when the regulatory environment is still being written? Peer exchange on navigating Australia's tightening AI frameworks, what's getting blocked internally, and how organisations are making deployment decisions under genuine uncertainty.
IDG C
11:30 am - 1:00 pm Real-time vs batch: the architectural choice that is defining ANZ enterprise AI right nowThe decision between real-time and batch processing is shaping infrastructure investment for the next decade. Groups examine the workload patterns, cost implications and organisational readiness factors that should drive the choice — and where organisations are getting it wrong.
1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Networking lunch and VIP hosted lunches
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Building an AI-ready data platform from a 20-year-old architecture — what we kept, what we scrapped and why
Not every organisation can start from a clean slate. This session walks through the decisions made when modernising a legacy data platform to support AI workloads — which parts of the old architecture were worth preserving, where the shortcuts came back to bite, and the sequencing that made the difference between a migration and a disaster.
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
The API sprawl problem: How enterprise architecture teams are bringing order to a decade of point-to-point integrations
AI deployment exposes every integration debt accumulated over years of point-to-point architecture. How are ANZ enterprise architecture leaders rationalising their integration layers, what governance models are working, and what happens to AI velocity when the integration foundation is not fit for purpose.
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Solution Panel | When your cloud provider is also your AI vendor — managing concentration risk and lock-in at the enterprise level
Shane Ozartov -
Associate Director AI/GenAI, Enterprise Validation,
NAB
As hyperscalers bundle AI services into cloud contracts, the line between infrastructure provider and AI vendor is disappearing. This panel examines the concentration risk this creates, the negotiation leverage organisations are losing, and the architectural decisions that preserve optionality without sacrificing capability.
3:30 pm - 3:45 pm
Spotlight Session A: Five things we’d do differently — Confessions of an AI Leader
Rapid-fire practitioner confessions on the infrastructure decisions that looked right at the time and didn't age well. No slides, no polish — just the hard-won lessons from teams that have been in production long enough to have regrets.
3:45 pm - 4:00 pm
Spotlight Session B: Building internal AI engineering capability that scales - what works beyond hiring
You can't hire your way out of an AI engineering skills gap in ANZ. This session looks at what organisations are doing to build platform and ML engineering capability internally — what training programmes stick, what squad models work, and what the ones that failed had in common.
4:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Afternoon tea break
4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Panel Discussion | Who owns AI in your org? The CIO vs CDO vs COO turf war — and why it’s stalling deployment
Olga Lysenko -
Director,
Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
When everyone has a stake and nobody has final say, AI initiatives stall in committee. This session maps the ownership models actually working in ANZ enterprises and how to stop accountability gaps killing your infrastructure roadmap.
5:00 pm - 5:30 pm
C-Level talk | Cloud costs are out of control: How we got AI infrastructure spend back under governance without killing velocity
When AI workloads hit production, cloud bills follow and most ANZ finance teams were not prepared for the variability. A CIO on how they implemented FinOps discipline, brought compute spend under control and built a cost model that the CFO could actually trust, without slowing down engineering.
