AI Infrastructure and Enterprise Systems Summit - Day 2
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 - 9:30 am
Keynote | The infrastructure redesign imperative: When your platform can’t support what the business is asking AI to do
AI ambition is outpacing infrastructure reality in most ANZ enterprises. This keynote maps where the platform gaps are actually sitting — compute, data pipelines, integration, observability and what the organisations that are scaling have done differently at the infrastructure layer.
9:40 am - 10:10 am
Fireside Chat | Your workforce is already using AI - the shadow AI problem and what a real adoption strategy looks like
Michelle Tucker -
Head of Digital and CRM,
AstraZeneca
When employees are running sensitive data through consumer AI tools because your approved stack is too slow or too limited, you don't have an AI strategy problem you have a trust and enablement problem that no policy document will fix.
10:10 am - 10:40 am
MLOps at enterprise scale — what broke when we went from 3 models to 30
The jump from a handful of models to an enterprise-wide portfolio exposes every gap in your MLOps practice — versioning, monitoring, retraining pipelines, access governance and incident response. This is the honest post-mortem from a team that hit every one of those gaps and rebuilt their platform around them
10:40 am - 11:10 am
Morning break + exhibition
11:10 am - 11:30 am
Fireside Chat | From proof of concept to production infrastructure: the architectural decisions that determine whether you scale or stall
The jump from a working pilot to enterprise-scale infrastructure exposes every shortcut taken early — in data pipelines, model serving, observability and access control. This fireside chat maps the inflection points where ANZ organisations are succeeding and failing, and what the architecture of a scalable AI platform actually looks like in practice.
11:30 am - 12:00 pm
The delivery infrastructure gap: Why AI execution fails without the systems, data and operational backbone to support it
Most AI execution failures aren't model failures, they're infrastructure failures. This session examines the operational foundations organisations are missing: process visibility, real-time performance data, and the connective tissue between strategy and frontline AI delivery. A commercial perspective on what closing the gap actually requires.
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm
Solution Panel | We went from one use case to ten — here’s what broke and how we fixed the architecture
The jump from a single AI deployment to an enterprise-wide programme exposes every shortcut you took early on. This panel is the honest technical and organisational post-mortem from teams that lived through the scaling moment — what broke in the data layer, the integration layer, the model governance layer, and how they rebuilt.
12:30 pm - 1:00 pm
When to rebuild vs retrain — the engineering decisions nobody talks about in polished case studies
Every AI team hits the moment when patching the model stops working. This session gives you the signals, thresholds and real-world criteria for knowing when to cut your losses and start again — drawn from practitioners who have made both the right call and the wrong one.
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Networking lunch and VIP hosted lunches
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
The CIO and CDO relationship: who owns the data platform and why it matters for AI at scale
Olga Lysenko -
Director,
Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
When the CIO owns the infrastructure and the CDO owns the data strategy, the data platform sits awkwardly between them — and AI deployments pay the price. This panel examines the ownership models that are working in ANZ enterprises and what happens to AI velocity when they're not aligned.
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Fireside Chat | Retraining not replacing: How ANZ organisations are redesigning roles around AI rather than eliminating them
The redundancy headlines grab attention but the harder, quieter work is figuring out what your people do next. This session looks at the ANZ organisations actually investing in workforce transition what role redesign looks like in practice, and why most organisations are still avoiding the conversation.
3:00 pm - 3:20 pm
Building internal AI literacy that sticks: what works beyond a one-day training module
Kay Barry -
AI Implementation Lead - Risk and Compliance,
QBE Insurance
One workshop and a LinkedIn Learning subscription isn't an AI literacy programme. This session breaks down what ANZ organisations are doing differently to build genuine AI capability across the business — from the frontline to the executive floor — and what the programmes that failed had in common.
3:20 pm - 3:50 pm
Closing group session | The infrastructure debt confession — What Nobody Puts in the Case Study
The room divides by sector. One question per table: what is the one thing in your stack you wish you had fixed before you tried to scale AI? Every answer goes on the board, no attribution. Thirty minutes, zero slides — the most honest intelligence the summit produces, crowd-sourced from practitioners who have lived it.
