2026 AGENDA
This carefully crafted program combines inspiring keynotes with informal activities and time to build real relationships.
Tuesday
8:00
Breakfast
8:40
Opening Comments
Nick Barnett, AI Practice Lead, Aware Super
8:50
International Keynote: Beyond the Tools – Building MarTech Capability and a Culture of Excellence
Joana Tene, Global Director – eCommerce Capabilities, MarTech and DCoE Operations, Whirlpool Corporation
Most organisations have the platforms, yet talent and technology often work against each other. As everyone becomes a technologist, not everyone becomes a strategist. For decades, companies have swung between centralised control and decentralised models, struggling to balance global consistency with local relevance. As a result, the gap between MarTech potential and Monday morning reality remains vast.
We’ll explore what it actually takes to build a future-fit organisation through intentional OE/OD, capability-building, and hybrid “Lite” Digital Centre of Excellence (DCoE) models. We’ll examine how to blend talent and tech more effectively and prioritise the capability gaps that matter most to business maturity and growth – ensuring your MarTech investments translate into sustained, scalable organisational capability.
9:25
Partner Keynote presented by Braze
10:00
Panel Discussion: The MarTech Skills and Capabilities of the Future, and What that Means for Workforce Transformation
Moderated by Nick Barnett, AI Practice Lead, Aware Super
Oliver Spring, Head of Marketing Capability, Qantas
Louise Granville, Program Director, Marketing Technology, Westpac
Mairead Jarrett, Head of Digital, Good Drinks
Luke De Landelles, Head of MarTech – Leisure, Flight Centre Travel Group
Against a backdrop of restructures and redundancies that are reshaping who is in market and what they can bring with them, the capability that once built judgement and brand instinct is slipping away. But the harder question sits one level up: it isn’t only which skills we hire for, it’s how the organisation itself reorganises around the capabilities now at our fingertips.
When a marketer can build in HTML in ten seconds and fifteen hundred saved hours have to go somewhere, the structures we work within start to bend; teams that were rigidly owned end to end become shared, porous, and harder to define. The organisations that get this right won’t just survive the disruption; they’ll redesign the way work moves through them. So we’ll discuss:
- What does the talent pipeline actually look like right now, from the graduate entering the industry to the senior leader recruiting for new roles?
- Is it really the next generation who are behind, or the layer in the middle?
- Once AI absorbs the low-value work, where do you reinvest the hours you get back, rather than letting them dissolve into business as usual?
- How do you redesign roles and team structures around shared, blended capability instead of protected patches?
- And what are the skills that don’t change, the ones we must be careful not to automate the experience out of?
10:40
Coffee Break & Networking
11:10
Partner Breakouts
11:40
Presentation: Yes, You Need to Hear It – AI, Governance and the Risk You’re Already Carrying
Lexie Walker, Senior Regional Marketing Director, Thomson Reuters
Most of us MarTech people are dabbling in AI, but how many beyond the heavily regulated industries have a clear governance structure around it? Playbooks are being written, legal and compliance teams are being pulled into rooms they’ve never sat in before, and tools are arriving with AI baked in as a default before anyone has decided what the rules are.
What does your organisation’s risk appetite actually allow, and where is that risk appetite being set without you? And when AI is generating at scale on behalf of your brand, how do you hold the line on authenticity and creative integrity rather than simply producing the average?
12:15
Partner Breakouts
12:40
Networking Lunch
13:40
Think Tank 1: PEOPLE – Nurturing the Teams and Developing Talent for the Organisations we Need to Be
Cathy Teo, Head of Engagement Lifecycle, ANZ
Organisations that have the stack but not the people, the culture, or the pipeline to run it.
Join your peers to discuss:
- Is AI genuinely driving the restructures happening across the industry, or is it a convenient scapegoat for decisions that were always coming?
- What happens to judgement and brand instinct when people get the title without doing the rungs?
- How do you build AI curiosity as a team-level default, not just among the technically confident?
- How do you recruit for roles you can’t fully describe yet, and write job descriptions for skills that are only just emerging?
- What responsibility do senior leaders have to shape Australia’s talent pipeline?
Think Tank 2: PROCESSES – Building the Operating Model, Ownership Structures for MarTech Maturity
Eloise Gillespie, Director, Strategic Initiatives, Optus
Most organisations don’t have a technology problem. They have an accountability problem, and AI is making both more urgent.
Join your peers to discuss:
- What doesn’t “all depend on the organisation” — what universal principles work for all?
- With IT vs Marketing, and often Regional vs Global, is the accountability we need even possible?
- How do you remove the translation layer between business and tech?
- What does it actually take to change how teams work across functions, ensuring sustained effort that turns a new system into genuinely new behaviour?
- How do you get business outcomes to lead, rather than tool capabilities, and who owns that accountability?
Think Tank 3: DATA – Readying Our Data Foundations for What the Future will Demand of Them
James Perry, Head of Digital Media, Data, Partner and Publisher Services, WooliesX
Underneath every ambition is the same unglamorous truth: it’s only as good as the data you put into it.
Join your peers to discuss:
- How do you align your stakeholders on a shared definition of value before you try to build on top of it?
- How do you build the feedback loops that tell you whether your MarTech is actually delivering on what it was set up to achieve?
- What are the non-technological prerequisites that determine whether your AI use cases can actually deliver?
- Why are we collecting this, and what are we going to do with it? What does a genuinely intentional approach to first-party data look like?
- How do you make the internal case for data infrastructure investment when it’s less visible than the tools it enables?
Think Tank 4: TECH – Making Smarter Technology Decisions on When to Build, Buy or Rent
Natalie Candarakis, Content Operations and Governance Manager, Bupa
AI fatigue is real and contracts are getting bigger, not smaller.
Join your peers to discuss:
- How do you push back on vendors who are adding cost rather than finding the efficiencies AI is supposed to deliver?
- When AI is embedded in every tool, how are you managing the governance without killing the pace of adoption?
- With agents collapsing workflows, what does it actually take to get the right use case selections, data foundations, trusting the machine to act?
- With the monostack dying, how are you managing integration complexity?
- When marketing as much to machines as humans, what do you need to be discoverable in an agentic world?
14:40
Wine Tasting
Paint & Sip
Golf
Pickleball
Workshop: From Tasks to Agents – AI that Genuinely Collapses Workflows
Michael Weeding, Digital & Workforce Transformation, perform.xl
Ten tasks. Two weeks. Collapsed into a single agent running in under an hour. That’s not a roadmap item; it’s already happening in MarTech teams around the country.
In this hands-on session, bring your laptops, your use-cases and your honest questions. No slides, no theory. We’ll work through real workflows; how to chain tools and nodes together, how to select the right use case, and what it actually takes to hand a process to a machine. You may well leave with something built.
19:00
Pre-Dinner Drinks Reception
19:45
Gala Dinner
22:00
Close
Wednesday
8:00
Breakfast
8:40
Opening Comments
Nick Barnett, AI Practice Lead, Aware Super
8:50
Partner Keynote presented by Sitecore
9:25
Keynote Panel: Inclusion in MarTech – The Human Qualities that Navigate Uncertainty and Build the Future
Linh Nguyen, Group Marketing Manager, ABC
Jo Jones, Head of Digital Marketing, Insignia Financial
Anja Starun, Director, Technology & Digital Transformation, Kayo Sports
Dayna Walton, Former Senior Digital Marketing Tech Lead, Nestlé
The inclusion conversation around MarTech and its future is more than an interesting diversity sidenote. AI is reshaping who feels secure in their role, and a moment of shared uncertainty has a way of making everyone feel, for the first time or the first time in a long time, that the ground beneath their job is less settled than they assumed.
The people who have navigated that feeling longest are those who built careers against the odds, in spaces where the systems were designed by others and rarely with them in mind. Along the way they developed exactly the qualities the whole industry now needs: the ability to lead with confidence and creativity in the absence of precedent; to be generous with knowledge rather than defensive about it; and to build psychological safety for others by being visibly honest about one’s own uncertainties.
This panel brings those voices to the centre, not as a sidebar, but as a masterclass. We’ll discuss:
- With the industry at a moment of shared uncertainty, how do we use it to build something more inclusive as a permanent, structural change?
- How have you built the confidence to show up and hold your own within the world of MarTech?
- What does it actually take to bring someone into a room, or onto a leadership team, who has never felt represented there before?
- How have experiences of exclusion shaped the way you lead others through change, and what can the rest of the industry learn from it?
- What does being generous with your voice, your seat and your knowledge actually look like in practice?
10:10
Partner Breakouts
10:40
Coffee Break & Networking
11:10
Think Tank 1: PEOPLE – Nurturing the Teams and Developing Talent for the Organisations we Need to Be
Cathy Teo, Head of Engagement Lifecycle, ANZ
Organisations that have the stack but not the people, the culture, or the pipeline to run it.
Join your peers to discuss:
- Is AI genuinely driving the restructures happening across the industry, or is it a convenient scapegoat for decisions that were always coming?
- What happens to judgement and brand instinct when people get the title without doing the rungs?
- How do you build AI curiosity as a team-level default, not just among the technically confident?
- How do you recruit for roles you can’t fully describe yet, and write job descriptions for skills that are only just emerging?
- What responsibility do senior leaders have to shape Australia’s talent pipeline?
Think Tank 2: PROCESSES – Building the Operating Model, Ownership Structures for MarTech Maturity
Eloise Gillespie, Director, Strategic Initiatives, Optus
Most organisations don’t have a technology problem. They have an accountability problem, and AI is making both more urgent.
Join your peers to discuss:
- What doesn’t “all depend on the organisation” — what universal principles work for all?
- With IT vs Marketing, and often Regional vs Global, is the accountability we need even possible?
- How do you remove the translation layer between business and tech?
- What does it actually take to change how teams work across functions, ensuring sustained effort that turns a new system into genuinely new behaviour?
- How do you get business outcomes to lead, rather than tool capabilities, and who owns that accountability?
Think Tank 3: DATA – Readying Our Data Foundations for What the Future will Demand of Them
James Perry, Head of Digital Media, Data, Partner and Publisher Services, WooliesX
Underneath every ambition is the same unglamorous truth: it’s only as good as the data you put into it.
Join your peers to discuss:
- How do you align your stakeholders on a shared definition of value before you try to build on top of it?
- How do you build the feedback loops that tell you whether your MarTech is actually delivering on what it was set up to achieve?
- What are the non-technological prerequisites that determine whether your AI use cases can actually deliver?
- Why are we collecting this, and what are we going to do with it? What does a genuinely intentional approach to first-party data look like?
- How do you make the internal case for data infrastructure investment when it’s less visible than the tools it enables?
Think Tank 4: TECH – Making Smarter Technology Decisions on When to Build, Buy or Rent
Natalie Candarakis, Content Operations and Governance Manager, Bupa
AI fatigue is real and contracts are getting bigger, not smaller.
Join your peers to discuss:
- How do you push back on vendors who are adding cost rather than finding the efficiencies AI is supposed to deliver?
- When AI is embedded in every tool, how are you managing the governance without killing the pace of adoption?
- With agents collapsing workflows, what does it actually take to get the right use case selections, data foundations, trusting the machine to act?
- With the monostack dying, how are you managing integration complexity?
- When marketing as much to machines as humans, what do you need to be discoverable in an agentic world?
12:05
Fireside Chat: From MarTech Madness to Mastery – Leading Your Teams to a Human-Centred Ecosystem
Andrea Peters, Associate Director of Marketing, Media & Acquisition, Auto & General Australia
The tech isn’t the hard part anymore. Most organisations have the platforms, but the challenge is the people around them: teams who admire the tech rather than own it; leaders protecting their patches; and the persistent gap between having the directive and actually embedding change. And underneath all of it, a genuinely hard strategic question: in a landscape of platforms, plugins, AI agents, BVOD, SVOD, OOH, LLMs and everything still emerging, how do you build an ecosystem oriented around outcomes rather than tools?
We’ll explore what it takes to shift from tech-stack thinking to ecosystem thinking: how to unify smaller, independent systems around commercial outcomes for both marketer and customer; how to balance long-term capability building against short-term tactical decisions; and how to think honestly about technical debt when the technology is moving faster than most organisations can govern. You can’t solve people problems with technology, but you also can’t lead through this moment by watching from the sidelines. You’ll examine what the leaders holding it all together actually do, and how to build that capability in yourself and your teams.
12:35
Closing International Keynote: From Adoption Metrics to Growth Outcomes – The Lessons from Unilever & Danone
Patrick Krul, Global Digital Lead (Interim), Unilever
We built the stack. We forgot the point.
The heart of what makes MarTech a compelling space is the challenge and opportunity of turning a complex, often fragmented ecosystem into a human-centred growth engine. Most organisations declare MarTech success when teams are using the tools, but usage without commercial impact is just an expensive habit. The two assets that actually drive growth are your people and your customers: what your teams can genuinely do, and what your customers actually need.
Technology is the enabler, not the source. We’ll examine what it takes to build feedback loops between MarTech investment and commercial outcomes across 40+ markets, without losing local relevance or drowning in dashboards; why the hardest thing isn’t the tech but the operating model; and how fragmented ownership, tensions between IT and Marketing, and global and local dynamics all collapse the translation from platform capability to business impact. You’ll leave with one practical reframe: replace your MarTech adoption scorecard with a growth outcome framework.
13:05
Closing Comments
Nick Barnett, AI Practice Lead, Aware Super
13:10