AI Infrastructure and Enterprise Systems Summit - Day 1
9:00 am - 9:10 am
Opening Remarks — ANZ AI & Infrastructure State of Play 2026
Nandita Sharma -
Director - Artificial Intelligence,
Digital Transformation Agency (DTA)
Chair's opening remarks — data-led benchmark of AI deployment and infrastructure maturity across ANZ enterprises in 2026.
9:10 am - 9:50 am
Leadership Panel | The ANZ infrastructure gap: Why our systems weren’t built for what AI actually demands
John Khoury -
Group Chief Technology Officer,
Strand Bags
Nicholas Tan - Chief Technology Officer, Monoova
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.
9:50 am - 10:20 am
From Core Banking to Context Banking: Architecting the AI Native Bank: A Customer Relevance Engine
Sudhir Mishra -
Interim Chief Technology, Digital and Data Strategy Advisor,
Community First Bank
Sudhir Mishra
Interim Chief Technology, Digital and Data Strategy AdvisorCommunity First Bank
10:20 am - 11:00 am
Solution Panel | Build vs buy vs borrow: The platform decisions CIOs are actually making in 2026
Dr Tom Gao -
Chief Information 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 - 2:00 pm
Networking lunch and VIP hosted lunches
2:00 pm - 2:40 pm
The API sprawl problem: How enterprise architecture teams are bringing order to a decade of point-to-point integrations
Lenka Bednarikova -
Head of Artificial Intelligence & Advanced Analytics,
Australian Retirement Trust
Olga Lysenko - Director, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
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.
Lenka Bednarikova
Head of Artificial Intelligence & Advanced AnalyticsAustralian Retirement Trust
2:40 pm - 3:10 pm
Panel Discussion| Cloud costs are out of control: How we got AI infrastructure spend back under governance without killing velocity
John Khoury -
Group Chief Technology Officer,
Strand Bags
Sourav Bose - Head, Enterprise AI Office, University of New south Wales
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.
Sponsored by: Wonderful AI
3:10 pm - 3:30 pm
Speed Networking - Power Rounds: Find Your Three Most Important Conversations Before The Day 1 Ends
3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Afternoon tea break
4:00 pm - 4:30 pm
The Attack Surface Nobody Modelled: Securing AI Infrastructure at the Speed You're Deploying It
Nivedita Newar -
Deputy CISO,
University of New South Wales
Most ANZ enterprises are deploying AI faster than they can secure the infrastructure underneath it, treating security as a retrofit rather than a design principle. This session takes a CISO's view of where that catches up with you: shadow AI tools running outside approved stacks, third-party model and vendor risk, and the expanded attack surface created by real-time data pipelines and API sprawl. A practitioner account of what a security-first AI infrastructure build actually requires, and what skipping it costs later.
4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
We ripped out the legacy core and lived to tell the story
Aman Dayal -
GM | Data. AI. Innovation,
Coates Hire Ltd
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.
