Innovate Aotearoa

• How is New Zealand prioritising digital innovation to drive economic growth and enhance public services?
• What steps is the government taking to strengthen cybersecurity across critical sectors, especially in light of evolving global threats?
• How is New Zealand fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors to accelerate innovation while ensuring data privacy and security?

• Modernising digital government services to drive efficiency, productivity and a unified customer service experience
• Innovating in partnership with the private sector (focusing on AI and Digital Identity)

• An overview of AI uptake in the broader R&D / innovation ecosystem
• Hear more about the Callaghan Innovation AI Activator and GovGPT

Spectrum will talk through our journey to completely Sovereign AI

• Safe, Secure, & Sovereign is achievable for all of Government.
• Sharing datasets across all departments is possible with Lantern Sovereign.
• Kiwi deserve better protections for their data.

• Combatting fatigue in the modern day workforce
• How technology can aid in reducing worker stress
• What does resilience mean in public service today and how do we help employee’s in this area?

• What does inclusivity look like in the Digital Age?
• Sharing learnings from launching bilingual location-based audio announcements on Auckland’s buses and trains
• How AI might boost inclusivity

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is high priority for governments worldwide, with the potential to unlock $1.8 trillion NZD of savings a year globally and more than $4 billion in Aotearoa alone. Despite the massive benefits, introducing DPI doesn’t need to be “another big IT project”. This session will explore the opportunity New Zealand has, and the approach we can take in the next year, to become a world leader in the rapid delivery of nation-scale DPI transformation, transforming our citizens interaction with the state.

AI has catapulted from being a useful but illusive technology to potentially becoming one of the most strategic technologies the world has seen. Governments all over the world are looking at how the transformative power of AI can be harnessed to deliver the next generation of citizen-centric services and improve productivity.

While AI is estimated to contribute over USD 17 trillion to the global economy by 2030, the ability to realise these benefits is not without its challenges. Trust, Data Sovereignty, Security, and Data Protection, are front and centre of government policy makers and industry leaders.

Join us as we explore how governments are designing and implementing AI and Data Solutions to innovatively solve some of their most difficult problems, while effectively addressing these risks and challenges.

• Develop robust data governance frameworks to ensure ethical use of data
• Harnessing the potential of data assets with data analytics for evidence based decision making
• Promote data literacy and skills to empower public services to effectively collect, analyse and interpret data

• How data analytics is transforming the efficiency and effectiveness of public services.
• The potential of AI and machine learning to enhance decision-making and resource allocation in government.
• Measuring the impact of data and AI on public service delivery and citizen outcomes.

Roundtable 1: Data sovereignty, local solutions and maintaining industry leadership amidst the rapid growth of AI and cloud technologies
Brenda Banning, Vice President Industry, Value & Architecture, Oracle JAPAC
Ian Rogers, Managing Director, TEAM IM

Roundtable 2: Digitising Government in NZ – raising our ambition and lifting our pace
Tony Evans, Partner, Digital, KPMG New Zealand

Roundtable 3: Closing the Expectation Gap: How Government Can Improve Service Satisfaction with Data and GenAI
Gisele Kapterian, Senior Director APAC Public Sector Strategy, Salesforce
Melanie Macdonald, Distinguished Solution Engineer, Salesforce

Roundtable 4: Designing for our Digital Democracy
Steve Barnard, Managing Director, Pikselin

Roundtable 5: Elevating Public Sector Performance through Customer Experience Insights
Martin Flavell, Experience Consulting Practice Lead, Merkle Aotearoa
Alister Lilley, Head of Architecture Southern and Commerce, Merkle Aotearoa

Roundtable 6: Lessons learnt from Health New Zealand’s (Te Whatu Ora) Transformation
Nathan Carlton, Executive Director Public Sector & Managed Services, OSF Digital
Jo Styles, Group Manager Digital Systems Development, Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora)

Roundtable 7: Future-Proofing Digital Services: Integrating For A Secure, Cost-Effective AI Future
Ian Vanstone, Digital Integration Thought Leader; Former CTO, IntegrationWorks — now a Fusion5 company.

Roundtable 8: AI for public sector leaders: Elevating your people for better strategy & outcomes
Miles Fordyce, New Zealand Data & AI Lead, Accenture

Roundtable 9: What does Sovereignty mean to us, and what does it mean to you?
Damian Pons, CEO, Spectrum Consulting

Roundtable 10: A deep dive into a roadmap for rapid digitisation and modernisation of NZ public service delivery
Tim Dacombe-Bird, Public Sector Country Manager, AWS New Zealand

• Integrating technology to streamline processes to ensure all demographics accessibility
• Transparent communication channels for better accountability and trust
• Prioritising obtaining feedback from users for real time insights to adapt and improve
• Tailoring services to the needs and preferences of all citizens

Initiatives big or small always carry the risk of not delivering to purpose, value, cost or timeliness. Prashant will be sharing some insights around balancing the need for quality and timeliness. Many customers would often value an acceptable quality product as long as it is available in a timely manner. Many projects often miss this customer expectation and over-engineer quality. Equally there are projects that get delivered on time and budget, but miss the mark of customer expectations. Prashant will share his thoughts and experiences in leading projects where the right balance of quality, cost and timeliness had to be structure the framing of projects to continuously balance the expectations across quality, cost, timeliness and while keeping a focus on purpose and outcome.