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2024’s Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024 – held on the glorious Gold Coast in mid-October – has now wrapped. Fresh from shaking out the sand and washing away the saltwater, we asked three Brennan delegates to pen postcards of their key takeouts.

In mid-September, we were thrilled to participate in one of Australia’s premier technology events – the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2024. With several of our team meeting with CIOs and IT executives, sitting in on sessions, and our founder and MD, Dave Stevens, hosting a theatre talk, we asked three of our representatives for their reflections. And we end with our own summary of the event’s all-consuming topic: AI.

Duncan Ayres
Enterprise Business Development Manager

Over recent years, the leading topic at tent-pole events like Gartner was security – understandably so given the Optus and Medibank breaches. But this year marked the utter domination of AI. One common theme I picked up on was the recognition that a governance wave needs to wash through organisations before AI can be fully utilised. Aggregating, organising, and cleaning data are hugely complex tasks. For the most part, these are cleanly contoured mechanical tasks, and most organisations we speak to are on that journey. But it’s the more nuanced area of data governance that’s more nebulous right now.

Organisations are (rightfully) concerned about how data might be used, who has access to it, and how AI might introduce unwanted bias. My hunch is there will be a growing consideration of the principles and guidelines that govern the ethics of data collection, processing, and use. This was brought to life brilliantly in a session by Ann Larkins, Executive Director, and CIO at Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, as she demonstrated the crucial role of ethical data and the governance considerations inherent to AI initiatives.”

Nick Sone
Chief Customer Officer

“I’ve always enjoyed attending Gartner and seeing how the friction of innovation sparks conversations focussed on implementation. As technology evolves, so does the lead theme. (Spoiler alert: AI took star billing this year.) But after conversations with multiple CIO’s, I couldn’t help feeling there was a dissonance between the promised sunlit uplands of what AI might deliver with the lived reality of what organisations are experiencing.

What came through for me in many of those conversations is that robust discussions on a range of issues – effective change management, meaningful productivity uses cases, end-user productivity gains using existing tech, benchmarking ROI – continue to dominate within organisations.

One throughline that connected it all was the recognition that the AI embrace is complex and balancing that complexity with a users’ capacity to effectively implement AI initiatives isn’t as straightforward as imagined. Yet. As a result, some are adopting a “wait-and-see” position. But many more are taking measured, incremental and repeatable steps to adoption. Microinnovations is very much alive.”

Peter Soulsby
Head of Security

“AI is dead. Long live AI. I realise this sounds provocative. But having wandered the Xpo floor, dropped in at booths, and sat in on numerous sessions – many of which were incredibly illuminating – my overriding takeout was that the AI-centric agenda didn’t entirely quench the delegate thirst for definitive answers on how and where to leverage it.

At a macro level, I suspect AI (at least in the near-term) won’t save money, nor will it be the cure-all, fix-all silver bullet businesses are hoping for. At a macro level it could be argued AI is an incredible technology in search of utility. But zoom in a little, and targeted uses cases aligned with anything that looks like AI – be it machine learning, robotics, automation, LLMs, or Generative AI – is likely to turn the dial more effectively and efficiently over time than sweeping macro applications.

It’s a view that was elegantly expressed by Dave Steven’s, our founder and Managing Director, in his “Secure. Automate. Evolve. Repeat.” theatre talk, where he made a powerful case for Micro Innovations – the application of new technology to unlock incremental changes that deliver huge wins. Intentionally designed to be small but core to an organisation’s digital transformation strategy, these targeted, tailored, customised and incremental innovations can stimulate profound organisational change when done well.​

When I think about the security implications of AI, one of the considerations I hear across the industry is that company-wide use cases are leaving organisations susceptible to more unintended consequences than targeted AI applications, which don’t need to be governed so tightly, and aren’t as reliant on stringent security guardrails.

And on a non-AI front, I found Marty Resnick’s session – “The future of computing” – fascinating, especially his take on how the frenetic competition driving innovations in space technology will impact the rest of us earthbound mortals over the next 5-10 years.”