Delegate Registration & Coffee

Welcome by Summit Chair

MAKA KAMA
Chief Purpose Officer, Alliance ICT

This keynote would challenge the room to move beyond the false choice between innovation and governance. In an era of agentic AI, governments cannot afford to treat ethics, trust, and transparency as control mechanisms added after deployment. They must become design principles from the beginning if public services are to be scalable, defensible, and worthy of citizen confidence. That challenge is central to the event’s framing around responsible AI adoption, public trust, and implementation across policy, law, procurement, delivery, and risk management.

PREMILA JINA
President, WAITTA Inc

• Building trusted, ethical and citizen-centric governance for Agentic AI and government data—enabling innovation, protecting privacy and delivering measurable public value.
• Aligning AI, data, digital and cyber strategies across agencies
• Balancing centralised governance with agency-level innovation
• Embedding ethics, transparency and accountability from day one
• Measuring success beyond efficiency: trust, equity and outcomes

MODERATOR:

TOM DISSING
Agentic AI & Operating Efficiency Advisor, Technology Connect Australia

PANEL MEMBERS:

JONATHAN GRAY
Lead Partner, Enterprise Data & Information Management, Anchoram

PREMILA JINA
President, WAITTA Inc

ANDREW SMAILES
Executive Director, Raedan AI

OLGA LYSENKO
Former Director, Enterprise Data Strategy, Governance and Management, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

As government / enterprise moves beyond copilots to more autonomous AI, the real challenge is no longer model performance alone. It is whether agencies have the data foundations, governance controls, security architecture and operating discipline to let AI act safely, transparently and in the public interest.
This session will examine how to operationalise agentic AI in government by connecting policy intent to production reality:

• Governed data
• Clear accountability
• Human oversight
• Auditable decision flows
• Resilient hybrid architecture, and
• Continuous observability

It will explore the design choices that matter most in high-trust environments, including policy-by-design, privacy-by-design, interoperability, risk controls, vendor flexibility and measurable service outcomes.
The focus is practical and executive-level: how to move from experimentation and fragmented use cases to a scalable operating model that supports innovation without compromising trust, transparency or citizen confidence. For public sector leaders, this is the shift from AI capability to trusted institutional adoption.

PHILIP MUEHLECK
Technology Leader - National Security, IBR

CHRIS HOCKINGS
IBM Verify Strategy Worldwide, IBM

10:50 Morning Coffee & Networking

• Defining governance, oversight, and human-in-the-loop controls for autonomous AI agents in public sector data ecosystems
• Ensuring transparency, auditability, and explainability in agentic AI decision-making to strengthen public trust
• Embedding ethical guardrails, risk management, and accountability frameworks for AI-driven government services
• Leveraging agentic AI to enhance data-driven policy, service delivery, and cross-agency collaboration while safeguarding citizen rights

ANDREW SMAILES
Executive Director, Raedan AI

• Applying privacy-by-design across the full AI lifecycle
• Managing sensitive, linked and biometric data responsibly
• Regulatory expectations and lessons from recent failures
• Tools, controls and governance models that actually work in practice

MODERATOR:

JONATHAN GRAY
Lead Partner, Enterprise Data & Information Management,
Anchoram

PANEL MEMBERS:

BRUCE INNES
Data Governance, Protection & Privacy, Uniting

RUTH MARSHALL
Director, Data and Innovation, Hocone Pty Ltd

12:30 Lunch Break

• Governance must shift from static rules to adaptive, risk-proportionate models that anticipate inference, re-identification pathways, and emergent AI behaviour.
• Social licence is now as important as legal authority — public expectations around transparency and benefit are rising.
• Provenance, auditability, and explainability are essential foundations for trustworthy secondary use and AI.
• National and cross-jurisdictional linkage requires harmonised governance to support safe, consistent, repeatable data flows.
• Effective governance should enable innovation, embedding privacy and ethics into system design rather than constraining use.
• The future is co-governance: shared authority across custodians, researchers, policymakers, and communities.

NIVODITA SHARMA
Director, Data Strategy and Governance, Data Analytics Branch, Policy, Partnerships and Programs Division, ACT Health and Community Services Directorate

• Move beyond ethical principles to practical accountability – Learn seven structured actions that translate values like trust, fairness, and inclusion into measurable practice.
• Make ethical values visible and defensible – Discover how to evidence and clearly explain why your AI system should be considered responsible and trustworthy.
• Strengthen the human capability behind AI governance – Understand the critical human skills required to reflect, justify, and communicate responsible design decisions.
• Prepare before a crisis occurs – Build ethical reflection into project design from the outset to reduce risk, improve system outcomes, and protect organisational reputation.

A/PROF. THERESA ANDERSON
Chief Data & AI Ethicist, Connecting Stones Consulting, NSW Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, NSW Department of Customer Service

14:40 Afternoon Tea

• Why ethical frameworks often fail at implementation
• Operationalising ethics through governance, tooling and incentives
• Assigning ownership, accountability and escalation pathways
• Measuring ethical performance in AI-enabled systems

MODERATOR:

MAKA KAMA
Chief Purpose Officer, Alliance ICT

PANEL MEMBERS:

MAHENDRA SAMARAWICKRAMA
Director - AI Safety, Governance, and Policies, Centre for Sustainable AI

RUTH MARSHALL
Director, Data and Innovation, Hocone Pty Ltd

A/PROF. THERESA ANDERSON
Chief Data & AI Ethicist, Connecting Stones Consulting, NSW Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, NSW Department of Customer Service

• Identifying gaps in existing AI governance, assurance, and regulatory frameworks that limit public and organisational trust
• Moving beyond compliance checklists to embed ethics, transparency, and accountability by design
• Strengthening validation, auditability, and risk management across the AI lifecycle
• Aligning AI deployment with stakeholder expectations, societal values, and evolving regulatory standards

RUTH MARSHALL
Director, Data and Innovation, Hocone Pty Ltd

• Translating policy intent into real-world AI systems
• Governance checkpoints across the delivery lifecycle
• Managing risk, ethics and performance in production
• What “good” looks like in a trusted government AI use case

MODERATOR:

Mahendra Samarawickrama, Director - AI Safety, Governance, and Policies, Centre for Sustainable AI

Conference Day 1 Wrap Up

17:10- 18:10 1 Hour networking Drinks