Cloudflare Immerse Sydney

Date: September 4, 2025
Immerse by Cloudflare is a curated, one-day experience designed to bring together technology leaders, visionary developers, and strategic partners for a day of inspiration, collaboration, and bold ideas. Set against the stunning backdrop of Sydney’s iconic harbour, this immersive experience, across three tracks, will challenge conventional thinking and help you unlock new possibilities for your organisation.

The Cloudflare Developer Advantage

Aly Cabral — Vice President, Developer GTM, Cloudflare

1. The Challenge for Developers

• Building GenAI apps today is slow, expensive, and risky:
  • Avg. 29 weeks to launch
  • $1M+ in R&D
  • 30% abandoned mid-project
  • 50% of time wasted on infrastructure, not actual development
  • Developers need to move faster, avoid costly mistakes, and focus on innovation.

2. Cloudflare’s Value Proposition

• Everything learned from powering 20% of the internet is built into Cloudflare’s platform.
• Unified control plane + programmable global cloud network → deploy once, run anywhere.
• Reach: 335+ cities across 125+ countries (including mainland China).
• Code executes within 50ms of 95% of the connected population.
• 200+ cities with GPUs for AI inference workloads.
• In Australia: deploy seamlessly to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart.

3. The AI Era: AI Adoption Is Exploding

• 44% of developers already use AI in their workflow.
• By 2026: >80% of enterprises will use GenAI-enabled APIs, models, or apps (up from 5% today).
• By 2030: 50% of knowledge workers’ tasks will be AI-augmented (up from <1% today).
• Shift from augmentation (assistive AI) to automation (agentic AI):
  • Augmentation: “Help me draft a follow-up email.”
  • Automation: “Run a full campaign, send follow-ups, notify me when customers respond.”

4. Cloudflare’s Developer Advantage

#1 Infrastructure Efficiency

• Serverless inference that scales up/down to zero.
• Typical GPU utilization only ~30% — Cloudflare dynamically schedules workloads across its network for efficiency + cost savings.
• Uses “isolates” (not containers) for lightweight, fast execution (Typescript, JavaScript).
• Serverless billing: only pay for what runs.

#2 Orchestration

• No-complexity orchestration: schedule workloads near users, GPUs, or APIs to cut latency.
• Workers can interact with APIs, LLMs, services, or even browsers.
• Compute-time pricing means no costs while idle.
• Durable Objects & Workflows guarantee execution, retries, and reliability.

#3 Developer Experience

• AI and agent workflows integrated directly into Cloudflare Workers.
• Developers focus on application differentiation, not infra setup.
• Example: PayPal MCP Server → production-ready in 3 days using Cloudflare.
• Feedback: “With Cloudflare Workers, we can deploy in minutes what would otherwise take hundreds of hours.”

Key Takeaways

• Cloudflare gives developers global reach, serverless scale, and simplified orchestration out of the box.
• Purpose-built for the AI era: optimized for inference workloads, automation, and agents.
• Developers save time, cut costs, and move from prototype to production faster than ever.

Bottom Line:
Cloudflare is positioning itself as the best place to build GenAI apps and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers — giving developers the infrastructure, orchestration, and experience needed to turn ideas into production-ready impact at speed.

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Level Up Your Monolith: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Talk

Mick Davies, Developer Advocate, Revision3
https://www.revision3.com.au

https://refactory.com.au/audience/884190

Wrangler CLI
The secret sauce

• Provision just about anything locally
• Play with it, get to know it, Wrangler is extremely useful
• Huge range of services available

Workers: Your Monolith’s Best Friend ⚡
Offload heavy lifting without rewriting everything

• 🎯 Deploy in seconds
• 💡 Super fast response times
• 🌏 Global scaling, Region Earth!
• ✨ High redundancy, resiliency & failover
• 🧰 Typescript, Python or even WASM

Worker Side Quests 🚀
A whole new world!

• 🤙 RPC between workers
• 🦅 Do Repeat Yourself with CRON schedules
• 💼 Secrets, Static Assets, Vite with React / HTMX etc…
• 😉 How about Next.js deployed from a worker?
• 😎 Bind to other services like R2, KV, D1 etc…

Hono.js 🔥
Ridiculously undervalued

• 🌊 Plenty of built-in Middleware
• 🔥 I’m not going to lie, it’s kind of a big deal
• 🍹 How about < 50ms REST APIs
• 😅 Try it with HTMX / JSX on the frontend
• 😎 I use the Bearer token & JWT middleware regularly

Containers 📦
Run your existing Docker containers

• 🎯 Controlled with Docker files
• 💡 Balance costs between ram / cpu / ssd
• 🔥 Mix Workers + Containers in same request
• ✨ Great for zip files, ffmpeg, Go binaries etc…
• 🥹 Scale down to 0

Durable Objects 🎯
Guaranteed consistency… 🤯

• 🎯 Single source of truth with SQLite or KV
• 💡 Handles thousands of socket connections
• 🔥 Multi-tenanted architecture? Look up by entityId
• ✨ This presentation is on a durable object
• 🤠 Hard to understand initially, I get it!

D1: SQLite Goes Global 💾
Easily fire up new DBs

• 🎯 It’s SQLite on the edge
• 💡 Point your monolith to D1
• 🔥 Don’t forget indexes & migrations!
• ✨ Databases for each tenant?

D1: Global Read Replicas 🥹
Super handy read replicas

• 😄 Low latency DB reads
• 🤘 Low maintenance to distribute data globally
• 👀 Single API (Session + Bookmarks) to Read or Write
• 🌏 Data closer to end users

AutoRAG 📜
Managed RAG is gaming changing

• 🤘 Upload data & test in playground
• 😎 Huge file support & utilises R2, Vectorize & CRON
• 🤓 How about a quick search for your customer service?
• 🐙 Compare embedded records with AI prompts

AI Models 🤖
Cost effective AI models

• 📦 Text, image & audio models available
• 🌭 Utilising streaming responses when possible
• 🔥 Super cost-effective
• 😉 Use frontier models to generate system prompts
• 🦅 Let’s demo the Leonardo.ai image model!

What Else Is There? 🦅
Other services you can integrate with your platform

• 🙏 Realtime - WebRTC, chat, polls, batteries included SDK + UI
• 📬 Email Routing - Capture, intercept, reply from Workers
• 💰 KV - Cheap, ultra fast CDN to leverage
• 🚀 Hyperdrive - Supports existing Postgres / MySQL with caching
• 💂 Turnstile - Can I say a better recaptcha?
• 🔐 Access - Lock down environments, preview apps
• 🌏 Load Balancers - Great for existing VMs!

Your Take Away 🫏
What can you do today?

• 🤠 Install Wrangler CLI & create a Typescript Worker
• 😎 Try a Durable Object accessing by a unique ID
• 😉 Throw & Catch JSON into a Queue inside of a Worker
• 🗃️ Migrate a D1 database and enable Read Replicas
• 🤖 Stream AI responses to users
• 🥤 Use Big Slurp to copy from S3 to R2
• 📦 AutoRag & Playground with your PDF / Word documents

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Empowering AI Exploration for Developers: From Ideas to Impact at Speed

Paul Thompson, Senior Director of Engineering GenAI, Canva

1. Start with the Problem

• Users don’t want “AI” — they want their problems solved.
• AI initiatives must be aligned with the company vision and resonate with what engineers can empathize with.

2. Define Quality Early and Together

• Build a shared definition of quality across Engineering, Product, and Design.
• Quality must be the north star before diving into experiments.

3. Enable Exploration & Demo Culture

• Encourage rapid experimentation and a “demo-first” mindset from day one.
• Support small teams or individuals to explore ideas → later consolidate into a portfolio of risks and opportunities.
• Allow rapid procurement and easy expensing to reduce friction.

4. Target Production Early

• Production should be the initial milestone, not an afterthought.
• Iteration is inevitable — confidence comes from e2e, integration, and unit testing.
• Evaluation is central: “evals is all you need.”
• Customer feedback is the ultimate evaluation.
• Shift from human evals → AI-driven automated evals.

5. Evaluation & Testing in Production

• Use A/B tests in production and gather live signals to improve models.
• Watch for “old AI smells” (degrading performance, outdated prompts).
• Be flexible with prompts (“GPT-4 tipping”) and model providers — assume some APIs (e.g., ChatGPT) may be unreliable.

6. Key Principles

• Start with problems, not tech for tech’s sake.
• Define quality standards collaboratively.
• Ship faster by enabling exploration and iteration.
• Treat production as the proving ground
• Customers are the best evals
• Embrace future mutability to leverage new models, providers, and approaches as they emerge.

Bottom Line:
To drive AI innovation at speed, teams must ground efforts in real problems, align on quality, foster exploration, and embrace change — making production the proving ground and customer feedback the ultimate benchmark.

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Fast & Future-Ready: Building Elite Dev Teams in the AI Era

Felipe Ryan, Moderator - Principal Solutions Architect, Cloudflare
Lambros Photios, Panelist - Founder, Adaca https://www.adaca.com

1. Building Global Dev Teams

• Adaca founded in 2018 as a local development agency.
• Scaled through an offshore ecosystem in the Philippines, now with 150+ developers.
• Offshore talent paired with strong infrastructure allows scaling at lower cost.

2. Tools, Infrastructure & Challenges

• Cursor IDE noted as powerful but resource-heavy (8–12 GB RAM), requiring high-spec laptops — a challenge for developers in emerging markets (Philippines, Africa,…).
• Cloudflare technologies (e.g., Durable Objects) highlighted as key enablers for distributed dev teams.

3. The “AI Pod” Model

• New workflow: Developer + AI pairing, especially for greenfield projects.
• Approach:
  1. Senior engineer writes technical specs first (avoid “vibe coding”).
  2. Build on a specialized stack: React + TypeScript + Hono + Cloudflare infra.
  3. Scale productivity by combining human expertise with AI assistance.

4. Philosophy on AI in Development

• Intentional adoption: not AI for novelty’s sake, but carefully integrated into workflows.
• Belief that we are entering a “Golden Age of Software Development” where AI will make dev teams far more efficient.

5. Tech to Watch

• Durable Objects, Sandboxes, Containers — cited as foundational for scaling modern, distributed, and AI-augmented teams.

Bottom Line:
Elite dev teams in the AI era will thrive by combining global talent, specialized stacks, AI-human “pods,” and intentional use of cutting-edge infrastructure — driving efficiency in what may be software’s most productive era yet.

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Collaboration for Impact: How We Made AI Infra Learning be a Force for Good

Franca Moretto, Technical Product Manager – API Platform, Canva

Building with purpose

Devops Represent

Gender in Tech: 68% men, 30% women, rest other.
Marginalised Genders Refers To All Genders Under Represented In Technology Such As Women, Non-Binary Folks, Transgender Men, People Who Are Gender Queer.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01780

Learning budgets at companies, but not used (?)
Cross organisation: Canva, Seek, Cloudflare

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Hands on Workshop: 0 to Agentic AI Building your own AI agent tools with MCP

Senior Principal Systems Engineer, Developer Platform, Cloudflare

Same MCP workshop as done few months ago, which formed the basis of my earlier blog post on MCP integration.
https://github.com/mhart/ai-to-the-world-mcp-workshop/

https://playground.ai.cloudflare.com

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T&Cs Apply: Trust & Character, Choices & Culture

Goran Risticevic, VP APAC, Cloudflare

1. Core Theme: Trust and Values in Technology

• Goran emphasizes that speed, scale, and resilience in cloud systems are not enough—trust is the foundation.
• In the absence of strong regulation, platforms and builders become custodians of trust, with design choices effectively shaping policy and values .
• For him, trust is not a slogan but something that must be earned daily through actions and principles.

2. Cloudflare’s Approach

• Cloudflare focuses on making the internet faster, safer, and harder to weaponize.
• The company’s culture emphasizes:
  • Protecting vulnerable communities (e.g., Project Galileo).
  • Defending free expression by refusing takedown requests that would undermine it.
  • Building privacy-first tools like 1.1.1.1 and transparency initiatives like Radar.
    • Design features such as “Under Attack Mode” that safeguard users at critical moments .

3. Personal Story and Motivation

• Goran shared his childhood experience of being forced into the army at 14 in Bosnia.
• Returning home after a year, his parents thought he had died—only a few children survived.
• These formative experiences taught him the true meaning of resilience, trust, and reliance on others.
• Later, migrating to Australia, he rebuilt his life and carried those values into his leadership .

4. Acting on Principles

• Examples where Cloudflare acted based on principle rather than obligation:
  • Defending UN Women Australia during a coordinated cyberattack on International Women’s Day.
  • Building tools that default to transparency and protect real people, not idealized users.
• Goran stresses that the quiet, unseen decisions—when no one is watching—reveal true leadership and character .

5. Launch of the “Integrity Company” Concept

• Introduced the idea of an “Integrity Company”:
  • Not a slogan but a posture, a way of working and aligning with partners who share the same values.
  • About standing together, backing each other, and holding principles even when inconvenient.
    • Cloudflare is rolling this out from Sydney across the region, with a Q4 launch event planned .

In Good Company Principles →
What it Looks Like in Practice

Protect what’s vulnerable	Step in when others can’t; defending critical services, communities, and systems that rely on us.
Default to transparency	Be honest early. Share the why; especially when things go wrong.
Build for real people	Design with empathy for the overlooked, excluded, or at risk -not just the ideal user.
Lead with principle	Do what’s right even when regulation is silent; and be willing to take a stand
Share what we learn	Document and publish so others can build on what we’ve figured out
Set defaults with care	Make the secure and ethical path the easy one; because infrastructure shapes behaviour
Show up when it matters	Use our presence and reach to help others when silence would be easier

https://ingoodcompanybycloudflare.splashthat.com

6. Closing Message

• Building secure, open, and resilient infrastructure requires shared responsibility across companies.
• The ask: define and build these principles together, not in isolation.
• Trust is fragile but powerful when earned—choosing values daily shapes both organizations and people.

“Our design becomes a policy. What ends up the default becomes a value.”
“The most defining moments in leadership aren’t public — they’re the quiet ones when no one is watching.”

“None of us build in isolation. If we want an internet that is open, safe, and resilient, we must choose to build it that way together.”

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Invisible Adversaries: Security Resilience in the Age of Autonomous Systems

Volker Rath, Field CISO, Cloudflare

The Internet is no longer a human-to-human network; it is now an autonomous ecosystem dominated by bots, crawlers, and AI agents. This shift has created a threat landscape where adversaries operate as persistent, adaptive forces that blend seamlessly with legitimate traffic. Traditional security approaches—built for discrete attacks—are failing against coordinated, AI-powered campaigns that exploit our fragmented defenses.

1. The Changing Internet

• The internet is no longer just people-to-people.
• 60% of all traffic is now machine-to-machine, with 30% coming from bots:
  • Good bots (e.g., search engines).
  • Bad bots that scrape sites or attack systems.
• AI-generated traffic grew 250% in the past year globally, and 200% in Australia alone .
• This shift is creating what Rath calls the Autonomous Internet — where APIs, microservices, MCP servers, and third-/fourth-/fifth-party integrations dominate.

Bots make much “better” hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare recently blocked a 11.5Tbps and 5.1 billion packets/sec attack.
The biggest ever seen…so far.
If each packet was 1mm long…

• a queue of 5100km of packets per 1 sec.
• 1M floppy disks/sec
• 8x to the moon during the 10min attack

2. Risks of an Autonomous Internet

• Complexity = new risks: as services connect across multiple layers of APIs and providers, visibility decreases.
• CISOs are increasingly joined by risk and compliance managers, reflecting concern over third-, fourth-, and fifth-party risks .
• Key risks include:
  • Cyber risks becoming commercial risks (e.g., business disruption).
  • Threat actors using AI to scale and automate attacks.
  • Loss of trust if autonomy is exploited maliciously.

3. Threat Landscape

• Attackers remain the same actors with the same goals: credentials, identity, and money.
• AI simply gives them more powerful tools.
• Familiar threats like DDoS attacks are growing in scale and frequency.
• The challenge: balance innovation and convenience with resilience and control .

4. The Core Mission: Trust

• Commerce and digital interactions depend on trust.
• If AI-driven autonomy spirals out of control, trust erodes, and commerce breaks down.
• Cybersecurity isn’t just about protection — it’s about safeguarding the fabric of the commercial internet .

5. Recognition of Leadership

• Matt Prince, Cloudflare’s CEO, was recently named #1 in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
  • Recognized for defending organizations not only from technical cyberattacks but also from threats that undermine trust in the digital economy .

Closing Message

• The internet is rapidly shifting toward autonomy, driven by AI and bots.
• Organizations must confront new layers of risk while ensuring resilience.
• Above all, the priority is maintaining trust — without it, neither the internet nor commerce can function.

“The internet is no longer the internet we knew — it’s becoming the Autonomous Internet.”

“If we lose trust, we lose commerce.
Commerce simply does not work without trust.”

The rise of the Autonomous Internet demands a new focus on multi-party risk management and trust preservation. Without trust, both the internet and digital commerce cannot survive.

“Cyber risks are now commercial risks — business disruption is the real danger.”

Cloudflare’s mission is to help you create trust with your customers.

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Cleared for Takeoff: How Flight Centre Secures and Scales with Zero Trust

James Allworth, Moderator - VP, Head of Innovation and Head of Singapore office, Cloudflare
Trent Newton, Panelist - Head of Technology, digital brands, Flight Centre Travel Group

As one of the world’s largest travel retailers, Flight Centre must protect customer data, empower a global workforce, and keep websites running flawlessly—even during high-traffic holiday promotions. Legacy security models couldn’t keep up with the pace of growth, distributed teams, or surging online demand.

Flight Centre embraced Zero Trust to replace outdated VPNs, safeguard critical systems, and deliver secure, seamless access without slowing employees down. They ensured resilience during peak booking periods (using Cloudflare Waitroom), scale confidently, and future-proof their business in an industry where downtime is not an option.

Online only: Skyscanner, Kayak, Google Flights
→ 3 million searches/day

AI positive outlook within guardrails

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Securing AI Agents: Cloudflare’s Framework for Safe Innovation

Aly Cabral, Vice President, Developer GTM, Cloudflare

AI agents are unleashing new levels of productivity, yet their autonomy introduces profound security and operational risks. For technology & business leaders, safe adoption is paramount. This session reveals a proven three-pillar framework for managing agentic AI—focusing on Technical Security, Operational Control, and Governance & Accountability. Discover how organizations can effectively build and deploy secure, compliant AI agents in production environments.

Monolith > Microservices > Nanoservices (agentic AI)
Hyper-customization

Millions of distinct micro applications

• scale
• Speed (to start)
• Security

Sandbox SDK
https://github.com/cloudflare/sandbox-sdk
Demo

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Hacking a Billion Dollar Bank in 20 Minutes

Glenn Wilkinson, Ethical Hacker, Keynote Speaker, and Founder

https://www.glenn-wilkinson.com
Agger Labs agger-labs.com
https://thehackinggames.com/

1. Speaker Background

• Ethical Hacker: paid by clients to expose vulnerabilities before real attackers exploit them.
• CEO & Co-Founder of Aga Labs: mission is to eradicate ransomware with a specialized protection platform.
• Ambassador for the Hacking Games: encourages youth to pursue ethical hacking careers.
• Experienced global keynote speaker (Vegas, London, Moscow, Sydney, etc.) .

2. The Threat of Ransomware

• Ransomware = biggest cyber threat of 2025; existential risk for modern businesses.
• 69% of Australian businesses hit in the last year (up from 56%).
• Average cost of a breach = AUD $7M (ransom + downtime + reputational damage).
• Framework: Essentials Eight by ACSC
  • Basic cyber hygiene: MFA, backups (3x), patching, password manager…
• Under Australia’s Cybersecurity Act (2025):
  • Breaches must be reported within 72 hours.
  • Paying ransom must also be reported.
  • Stricter rules for critical infrastructure .
• High-profile incidents:
  • Wineworks, Medivac (AUD $125M loss), Latitude (14M records leaked).
  • Qantas Airlines breach via ScatterSpider, an English-speaking ransomware gang exploiting a third-party call center.

3. Evolution of Hacking

• 1960s: “Hacks” = clever ways for students to get more mainframe time.
• 1970s: “Phone phreaks” like Captain Crunch whistle — exploiting tone systems to make free long-distance calls.
• 1990s: Hacker crews (Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, Evil Angelica) — website defacements akin to digital graffiti.
• 2000s–2010s: Rise of nation-state hacking; Stuxnet (U.S./Israel vs Iran) pivotal example.
• Ransomware origins: first case in 1989 (AIDS Trojan) — distributed by floppy disk, ransom requested via mailed cheque.
  • DragonForce Ransomware Cartel, RaaS, LockBit

4. Modern Ransomware

• Far more sophisticated today — often run by well-funded gangs.
• Still driven by the same motivations: credentials, identity, money.
• Uses extortion tactics: file encryption + threats to leak stolen data.
• Scattered Spider: key English-speaking ransomware group targeting enterprises via social engineering and outsourced support centers .
• LinkedIn → employees → corporate structure, email finder with names, Buy a lookalike domain name, Phishsoup
  • Metasploit demo https://www.metasploit.com

5. Defense Principles

• Resilience > Perfection: you can’t stop all attacks, but you can prepare.
• Build layered defenses (“onion model”) across organizational, individual, and technical levels.
• Adopt a daily improvement mindset — even small incremental steps improve survivability.
• Ransomware protection requires endpoints, zero-day readiness, and proactive response.

http://canarytokens.org
https://canary.tools/love
Asset management: know what you have (https://runzero.com)
People

6. Closing Message

• Cyberattacks are inevitable, but resilience ensures survival.
• Businesses must focus on:
• Preparedness (response plans, layered defenses).
• Transparency (reporting breaches, regulatory compliance).
• Continuous improvement in security posture.
• Glenn’s call to action: fight complacency and treat ransomware as the defining cyber risk of our time .

Bottom Line:
Ransomware is no longer just a nuisance — it is an existential business threat. Survival depends not on perfection, but on resilience, transparency, and continuous defense innovation.

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Resilience Under Fire: Securing Global Banking in an Age of Disruption

Chelsea Capizzi-Walsh, Crisis Management and Business Continuity EM, Crisis Management, CBA

In an era of rising cyber threats, geopolitical tension, and operational complexity, how can financial institutions stay resilient under pressure? Chelsea explores the critical role of technology in enabling crisis response and ensuring business continuity across global banking environments.

1. Speaker Background

• From Virginia, USA, shaped by experiences of 9/11, anthrax attacks, and sniper shootings during high school years.
• Inspired by her father, a Marine and homeland security professional: “The second you stop living your life the way you want to live it, they’ve already won.”
• Career focus: continuity, resilience, and crisis communications.
• Previous roles: FEMA (crisis comms), Pentagon IT Agency, U.S. Senate, Johns Hopkins (Ebola epidemic, Baltimore riots).
• Relocated to Sydney to work at CBA. CBA handles 40% of all payments in Australia.

2. Philosophy of Security & Resilience

• Security is multi-layered: just like home security has locks, alarms, and emergency services, CBA has SOC, plans, policies, and redundancy systems.
• It’s not “if” but “when” an incident occurs — response is what matters most.
• People are the greatest asset: diverse perspectives (cybersecurity, sales, military, intel, etc.) strengthen response capability.
• Preparedness = flexibility + creativity: encourage “safe breaking” in training to uncover weak points before real incidents .

3. Incident Response at CBA

• Response teams activated by incident type:
• Technical Response Team – resolves tech/system issues.
• Situation Management – tactical coordination.
• Business Response Team – customer impact, support systems, branch adjustments.
• Crisis communications = critical: single collective voice to maintain trust and consistency.
• CBA must react fast: often front-page news within 2 hours of a disruption.
• Example: while CBA wasn’t directly impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, 3rd/4th party dependencies were — showing the importance of ecosystem-wide readiness .

4. Recovery & Learning

• Recovery has a long tail — customer reassurance and regulatory engagement are crucial.
• CBA coordinates with APRA and government agencies (handles ~40% of all AU transactions).
• Debrief culture: analyze what went well, what failed, and what to improve — “Don’t make the same mistake twice.”

5. Role of AI in Crisis Management

• AI is an aid, not a replacement for human judgment.
• Used to:
  • Automate repetitive tasks.
  • Organize overwhelming data streams.
  • Support leadership by filtering questions, options, and recommendations.
• Particularly useful in high-information, high-stakes events, but final decisions remain human-driven .

Key Takeaways

• Resilience > Perfection — preparation and adaptability ensure survival.
• People + process + tech must align for effective crisis management.
• Communication and trust are as critical as technical fixes.
• AI is a force multiplier, but human oversight is non-negotiable.

Bottom Line:
At CBA, crisis management blends human expertise, structured response teams, strong communications, and AI tools — all aimed at protecting customers, maintaining trust, and ensuring resilience across Australia’s financial ecosystem.

“The second you stop living your life the way you want to live it, they’ve already won.” — her father, post-9/11.
“Your people are your greatest asset — their perspectives build capability.”

“AI does not replace human judgment,
especially in high-stakes scenarios.”

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Disruptopia: From Rustbelt America to the Cutting Edge of AI

Stephen Scheeler, Former Facebook ANZ CEO, AI Pioneer, and Australia’s Leading Voice on Technology, Disruption & Leadership
Australian startup https://www.o8t.com

Opening slidedeck with my 2018 TEDxDSydney photo from the ICC gantry 🔥.

1. Leadership Lessons from Facebook

• Leaders must anticipate third-, fourth-, and fifth-order effects of change, not just the obvious next step.
• Speed and paranoia are assets: moving quickly while staying alert helps organizations survive disruption.
• Facebook’s culture embraced this through symbols like the reversed Sun Microsystems sign, reminding employees that even giants can fall if they miss a technological pivot.

2. From Facebook to Brain AI Startup

• Scheeler co-founded Omniscient Neurotechnology (Omniscient/Omnition) with a neurosurgeon and AI expert.
• The company focuses on connectomics: mapping the human brain’s neural networks with AI.
• Unlike Elon Musk’s Neuralink (hardware-focused), Omniscient builds software brain maps to guide doctors with precise, personalized insights .

3. Transforming Mental Health and Brain Medicine

• Traditional diagnoses like “depression” are imprecise—there are likely hundreds of phenotypes.
• Omniscient’s tools allow doctors to pinpoint specific faulty brain circuits and target them with therapies like TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation).
• Results: patients have experienced dramatic improvements in suicidal thoughts, intrusive thinking, and emotional regulation .
• Applications extend to neurosurgery, stroke recovery, brain tumors, and cognitive enhancement.

4. Partnerships, Growth, and Recognition

• Omniscient collaborates with over 100 major U.S. hospital systems, including Johns Hopkins.
• Won awards at SXSW against major AI players (Google, OpenAI).
• Featured in the New York Times for saving patients’ abilities (e.g., avoiding speech loss in brain surgery).
• Recently formed a joint venture with Elon Musk and gained attention from high-profile figures like Robbie Williams, who supports their mental health mission,
• So far helped 15.000 patients

5. Seven Leadership Lessons for the AI Age

Scheeler distilled insights for thriving in the 21st century:

1. Energy drives culture – leaders’ energy sets organizational tone.
   • Your energy sets the tone
2. Front-row mentality – always place yourself where the action and relationships are strongest.
   • 2 kinds of people: trucks & trailers. Be a truck.
3. Hire for learning and uplifting others – fast learners who elevate teams matter more than résumés.
4. Focus on others’ success – leaders succeed by making their people successful.
5. Listen, turn off distractions, and think deeply – protect attention from constant digital noise.
6. Curiosity is a superpower – AI is just a tool; human vision and creativity remain the differentiators.
7. Move fast and embrace hyper-iteration – success depends on rapid cycles of experimentation, learning, and adaptation .

6. Closing Message

• Business fundamentals remain, but speed and obsession now matter more than ever.
• AI won’t replace leaders—it will amplify those who learn how to orchestrate humans and machines together.

“The game has changed:
move fast, embrace new tech,
and you’ll be the winner.”

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