Government Innovation Showcase New South Wales
Registration, Coffee & Hellos
8:00 AM - 8:55 AM (55 mins)
Settle in, grab a coffee, and meet a few friendly faces before we begin.
Lake Room
Welcome & How to Make the Most of Today
8:55 AM - 9:10 AM (15 mins)
A short welcome, plus a few quick tips to help you connect, share, and get real value from the day. We’ll also run a couple of quick polls to see what everyone’s interested in and what people are working on right now.
Lake Room
Ministerial Address
9:10 AM - 9:20 AM (10 mins)
Lake Room
Solving the Innovation Paradox: Hard-Won Lessons from the Arizona Desert
9:20 AM - 9:40 AM (20 mins)
In the race to modernise the public sector, leaders often face a paradox: the guardrails intended to ensure safety and trust are frequently perceived as roadblocks to the very progress residents expect. Drawing on his tenure as Arizona’s inaugural Chief Data and Analytics Officer and previous role as the Director of the Government Transformation Office, Joshua Wagner demonstrates how governance frameworks can be a catalyst for fostering innovation and improving outcomes for both the public and the public sector workforce.
Lake Room
Industry Insights - Innovation Under Pressure: How Governments Modernise Without Losing Control
9:40 AM - 10:00 AM (20 mins)
Public sector leaders are being asked to modernise at the same time as cyber threats rise, budgets tighten and AI accelerates decision-making. This session explores what innovation really means in that environment, where failures are no longer just technical but public, and where trust has become as critical as performance.
Drawing on lived experience across large, high-accountability government environments, Neville Pinto will examine how rising automation and complexity are reshaping risk, why security now behaves like critical infrastructure rather than a support function, and why the most credible innovation path today is often simplification, not expansion.
This keynote is designed for CIOs, CISOs and senior technology leaders who are navigating transformation under constraint. It offers a leadership perspective on how to introduce AI and automation in ways that preserve visibility, control and public confidence, and how to modernise systems without quietly increasing fragility.
Lake Room
Thinking Ahead to Prioritise Now: Championing A Responsible, Reliable, and Future Ready NSW Public Service
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM (30 mins)
Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, it is pivotal for NSW government priorities to be spot on. Determining the right investments, strengthening leadership and workforce capability, and delivering operational efficiency at scale without compromising quality, equity, or public trust will be at the centre of it all. This session examines smart adoption of emerging technologies, clear governance and accountability, and the sustainability considerations essential in shaping a resilient public sector for the future New South Wales.
- How AI is reshaping government operations, roles, and decision-making, and what this will mean for leadership and workforce planning through 2026–2027
- Achieving operational efficiency at scale without compromising quality, equity, or integrity
- Global vs local solutions - Considering whether to build, adapt, or adopt AI models for NSW’s unique context
- Ethics and responsibility - Ensuring AI deployment is transparent, accountable, and aligned with public trust
- Environmental and sustainability considerations when adopting new technologies, progressing capabilities, and managing data centres
Lake Room
Industry Insights - Sovereign AI in Motion: Governing Systems That Keep Changing
10:30 AM - 10:50 AM (20 mins)
AI sovereignty is moving beyond policy, procurement and architecture. As AI becomes embedded in real workflows, agents, tools and decision systems, sovereignty becomes a continuous operating challenge.
Models change, access paths shift, costs move, safety behaviours evolve and infrastructure constraints become material. The question is no longer only whether an AI system was designed to be sovereign. It is whether it can remain governable under changing conditions.
This keynote explores AI sovereignty after go-live: how organisations can manage drift, dependency, assurance, fallback, human judgement and operational resilience as AI systems become more capable and more abstracted.
Morning Tea & Mingling
10:50 AM - 11:30 AM (40 mins)
Perfect time to swap notes and compare what’s working across teams and sectors.
Bel Parco Room
Welcome from Track Chair
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM (10 mins)
Setting the tone for the priorities and thorniest challenges Digital and CX professionals are facing.
Lake Room
Welcome from Track Chair
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM (10 mins)
Setting the tone for the priorities and thorniest challenges Tech and Data professionals are facing.
Pond 1 Room
Opening remarks from Track Chair
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM (10 mins)
Bel Parco Room
From Pilot to Payoff: A Working Session on Scaling AI in Customer Experience
11:40 AM - 12:00 PM (20 mins)
AI pilots are multiplying faster than they're maturing. Teams are jumping from "interesting tech" straight to deployment, with competing pilots, vendors pushing token consumption ahead of value, and no shared view of the benefits being chased. The result: lots of activity, limited scale, growing scepticism.
In this interactive session, Russell shares real (de-identified) case studies of AI deployments that didn't land, unpacks the patterns behind them, and walks the room through a practical framework you can apply to your own pilots. Walk away with:
- A clearer view of why AI pilots stall in customer experience
- A simple framework for prioritising use cases and setting benefit targets
- Language for renegotiating vendor deals around outcomes, not tokens
- A checklist to stand up (or sharpen) an AI steering group with real decision rights
Lake Room
From Policy to Practice: Enabling Safe, Scalable AI Innovation Across NSW Government
11:40 AM - 12:00 PM (20 mins)
Pond 1 Room
Tackling Busy, Burdensome Tasks: AI in Daily Government Operations
11:40 AM - 12:00 PM (20 mins)
- Moving from task automation to decision augmentation, and designing decision support not decision replacement
- Risks of over-automation in government
- Protecting service quality while increasing efficiency, consistency and accuracy
- Practical use cases across policy, operations and frontline teams
Bel Parco Room
Industry Insights - Building a Strategy for an AI-First Government
12:00 PM - 12:20 PM (20 mins)
We are entering an AI-first era of government, where agentic capabilities will fundamentally transform how residents engage with services and how public sector teams deliver outcomes. Imagine a future where digital workers anticipate needs, automate decisions, and orchestrate services seamlessly, creating more responsive, personalised and trusted government experiences.
Turning that vision into reality requires a pragmatic shift. Legacy systems and siloed information continue to slow progress and limit AI’s potential. By adopting a content-centric strategy with AI at its core, agencies can unlock automated insights, streamline workflows, and strengthen security—driving operational resilience and accelerating program delivery with measurable impact.
Lake Room
Industry Insights: One Source of Truth: How Australian Departments are fixing the portfolio and project delivery visibility gap using a purpose-built government platform
12:00 PM - 12:20 PM (20 mins)
Government agencies face growing pressure to deliver strategic initiatives faster with greater transparency, stronger governance, and clearer outcomes, all at lower cost.
Planview and Hummingbird share a cost-effective, purpose-built approach to government portfolio management that helps agencies:
- Gain clearer visibility across projects, programs, and portfolios to deliver on-time and on-budget
- Strengthen governance and decision-making through a centralised platform
- Align investment and resources to strategic priorities to show ROI
Pond 1 Room
Keynote
12:00 PM - 12:20 PM (20 mins)
Bel Parco Room
Smarter Services, Better Outcomes: Advancing Service and Digital Innovation Across NSW Government
12:20 PM - 1:00 PM (40 mins)
Services should be designed around responding to real-time user needs, not held up by organisational silos and friction-filled digital journeys. This session refines what is needed to scale successful innovation across agencies in ways that lift operational efficiency without compromising service quality.
- Designing services around citizen needs, not internal structures or agency boundaries
- Reducing complexity and friction across online service journeys
- Scaling successful service pilots across agencies while maintaining consistency and trust
- Ensuring digital innovation enhances operational efficiency without compromising service quality
Lake Room
Integrating and Upholding Secure, Responsible and Resilient Data and AI Systems
12:20 PM - 1:00 PM (40 mins)
Trust must be designed into digital services from the outset — not retrofitted after risk emerges. This session explores how strong data governance, clear guardrails, and transparent, accountable AI practices form the foundation for responsible innovation— enabling progress without compromising public trust.
- Protecting privacy and maintaining transparency and trust in citizen-facing AI and data initiatives (designing transparency into services by default)
- Data governance as the foundation for AI - Establishing policies, standards, and oversight mechanisms to ensure safe and ethical AI adoption
- Striking the balance between innovation and risk to ensure lasting progress and retained trust
- Adhering to guardrails, guidance and frameworks
- Why trust is government’s most fragile asset
- How to handle mistakes in a digital-first world
Pond 1 Room
Building a Future-Ready Workforce and Reskilling for the AI Era: Required Skills for 2026-2030
12:20 PM - 1:00 PM (40 mins)
The future-ready NSW government will not be defined by people or technology alone, but by how seamlessly the two can work together. This session explores how AI is reshaping government roles through 2027 and beyond — enhancing productivity by augmenting frontline work rather than replacing it.
- People + AI: Building the Future Public Sector Workforce - how do we best align the two for enhanced productivity
- The evolving public service - How AI will reshape government roles into 2027 and beyond? - unpacking where AI tools have improved productivity by assisting, not automating, frontline roles
- Future workforce readiness: Assessing workforce trends that are materialising, how are people starting to use AI, and what skills are required/missing
- Upskilling for AI: Equipping public sector teams to work smarter – reducing fear and increasing engagement for AI-enabled workflows through targeted digital and data capability building
Lake Room
Industry Insights - Agentic Government Re-Imagining the Future of Public Service
1:00 PM - 1:20 PM (20 mins)
Bel Parco Room
From Access to Confidence: Creating Trusted and Inclusive Public Services
1:00 PM - 1:30 PM (30 mins)
- Designing inclusive, accessible human-centred services for all
- Addressing the digital divide: ensuring all people in NSW can access, afford, and safely engage with digital technologies and online resources
- Ensuring AI supports equity and avoids creating new barriers or bias
- Measuring inclusion, not uptake, and using data insights to continuously improve services
- How NSW Health’s Single Front Door Program is providing effective virtual care modalities and increasing equity of access for patients across the state
Pond 1 Room
Culture, Skills and Change: Why Technology Alone Doesn’t Deliver Productivity Gains
1:00 PM - 1:30 PM (30 mins)
- Building AI literacy across non-technical teams
- Addressing fear, resistance and ethical concerns (especially within a medical context)
- Sustaining productivity improvements over time - training beyond “how to use the tool”
Lake Room
From Foundations to Function: Building (AI) Products for Whole-of-Government Impact
1:20 PM - 1:45 PM (25 mins)
- Designing for impact from day one
- Turning capability into reusable products
- Building a government that can evolve
- Partnering with industry strategically, not transactionally
Lunch: Wander, Discover, Connect
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM (75 mins)
Grab lunch, have a wander, and chat with industry partners and peers about practical ideas you can take back to work. Arguably the most important part of the day!
Lake Room
Roundtable 1: AI in Operations - Automating the Mundane, Elevating the Strategic
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 2: Building Digital and Data Capability Across the Workforce
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 3: Citizen Trust in the Age of Digital Government
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 4: Service Experience 2.0: Redesigning Citizen Journeys with AI and Automation
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 5: From Pilots to Platforms: Scaling Innovation Across Government
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 6: Predictive Government - Using Data to Anticipate, Not Just React
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 7: Digital Twin Technology: Creating Virtual Models for Real-Time Decision Making
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 8: Navigating Legacy Tech Debt in a Rapidly Advancing Digital Landscape
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 9: Future Ready Tech in Emergency Services - Accelerating Operations to Optimise Response
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 10: Operation Co-Design - Moving from Consultation to Collaboration to Face the Challenges and Opportunities of AI
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 11: Getting AI Governance Right - From Principles to Practice
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Roundtable 12: Balancing Fairness, Equity and Compliance - Leveraging Real-Time Insights and Linking Datasets Across Agencies
2:45 PM - 3:45 PM (60 mins)
Lake Room
Closing Keynote: Ready, steady, flow: NSW Health's digital patient flow system
3:45 PM - 4:05 PM (20 mins)
Lake Room
Closing Remarks: What We’re Taking with Us
4:05 PM - 4:15 PM (10 mins)
We’ll pull out a few highlights from the day, share what’s coming next, and point you to ways to stay connected.
Networking Reception: Stay for a Chat
4:15 PM - 5:15 PM (60 mins)
Wrap up the day with good conversation and a few new connections. Thanks for making GIW your one-stop shop for benchmarking, industry updates, and great conversations.
