Innovation Day

Keynote - 9:00-10:30am

Keynote speakers

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Breakout sessions

• Amazon's culture of innovation and how it can work for businesses

  Amazon has a peculiar approach to innovation that is intrinsically linked to how Amazon uses technology and organises teams. In this session, be introduced to how Amazon innovates, through four interdependent elements: culture, mechanisms, architecture, and organisation. Dive deep into specific aspects of the Amazon culture such as the Amazon leadership principles, the working backwards mechanism, and two-pizza teams.

• Amazon's product management approach

  Discover Amazon's relentless drive to become Earth's most customer-centric company. From Alexa's soothing tunes to school supplies on Amazon.com, and powering businesses with AWS, Amazon aims to redefine customer experiences. What is the secret sauce? A product-driven approach that reshapes team dynamics. This session will cover how to empower business-led product teams to own lifecycles, foster rapid ideation, experimentation, and product launches. Join this session for insights into Amazon's enterprise-wide product management strategy to explore product-driven mental models, redefine the product manager role, revamp team organisation, and apply customer-centric strategies to define priorities. Learn how Amazon iterates, scales, and innovates, to help supercharge your journey towards product excellence.

• Sustainable generative AI: Moving beyond the hype and realising business value

  Generative AI is motivating companies to think about how AI might reshape customer experiences, transform the way they work, and improve business productivity. The success of generative AI applications depends on many factors, including identifying the correct use case, selecting the right model, managing machine learning operations, optimising ML infrastructure, and more. In this session, hear from a panel of experts across various industries on how to sustainably realise the full potential of this transformative technology.

• Sustainability and ESG transformation through technology

  Through learnings from Amazon and AWS own sustainability journey, as well as AWS conversations and support of a broad base of individuals and organisations around the world, there are clear trends we’re seeing at the intersection of technology and sustainability. Boards, executives and cross-functional leaders are under more pressure than ever to report and improve on social and environmental impacts and performance. Delve into learnings from global and local AWS customers and technology partners, future trends for ANZ organisations, and some example customer case studies. You’ll hear directly from local customer Port of Brisbane around how the cloud helped their business create sustainability and commercial value.

• How Nearmap uses AI to support communities affected by climate change and natural disasters

  Nearmap capture aerial imagery of 95% of the Australian population and 83% of the US population, several times per year. Nearmap’s imagery data now exceeds 50 petabytes and enables them to generate insights about the built environment at country scale. In 2023 Nearmap used this dataset and their AI capabilities to conduct an analysis of the US built environment that covered more than 275m+ inhabitants (83% of the US population), with 110+ million building footprints, on 850,000+ sqkm of land. In this session, learn how Nearmap utilise AWS services to train their deep learning models and generate insights at country scale and in support of disaster affected communities.

• Sunswift Racing: Solar powered journey across the harsh Australian outback

  Join this session to hear about the remarkable journey with Sunswift Racing, where a team of UNSW students raced more than 3,000 kilometres across the harsh Australian Outback to win the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge. Learn how this high performing team of students along with Team Principal, Richard Hopkins, used AWS to make the strategic decisions to win the race in challenging environmental conditions. This session will cover how Sunswift Racing utilised AWS to collect and analyse data and video to their team in Sydney to provide instantaneous strategic advice to the convoy travelling across Australia, while also enabling friends, family, and the public to witness their exciting journey in real-time.

• How innovation in space breaks connectivity barriers on Earth

  Project Kuiper will discuss their mission is to deliver fast, secure, and reliable connectivity to unserved and underserved customers around the world.

• Create business value at scale using generative AI to shape the future

  In our rapidly evolving world where generative AI holds immense potential and requires careful safeguarding, it is more important than ever for organisations to stay focussed on solving for business priorities. Embracing generative AI has become paramount. The scalability of cloud computing, the proliferation of data, and the rapid advancement of ML technologies have positioned AI for widespread adoption. To innovate rapidly with generative AI at scale, organisations not only need a modern data strategy, but an AI strategy too. This session explores lessons from past technological shifts and how leaders can apply them to craft a holistic approach for mobilising and scaling business value through generative AI. It delves into the holistic considerations for data and AI; and considerations across technology, people, processes, and mindset required for success.

Workshops

• Unleashing innovation: The generative AI revolution

  We find ourselves in a society where the line between what is created by humans, and what is created by machines, is increasingly blurred. Generative AI has been a turning point in how people create, design, and interact with technology. But how does it work and what are the benefits? Join this workshop for an understandable and approachable deep dive into how generative AI works and how to use Amazon Bedrock to build and scale generative AI applications with ease on AWS

  Speakers:

  • Matthew Purcell, Senior AWS Technical Instructor, AWS
  • Aarthi Natarajan, Senior AWS Technical Instructor, AWS
     

• Customer centric innovation: Amazon's Working Backwards workshop

  This highly collaborative workshop is inspired by the same customer-centric methods used by Amazon to develop breakthrough innovations our customers love, such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Echo, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Go, and AWS. In this workshop intended for business and technical decision-makers, engage with an interactive journey that introduces you to the Working Backwards process. Walk through some of the general activities and outputs of a full digital innovation Working Backwards project. While not required, it's encouraged participants attend with colleagues from the same team or organisation. Participants do not need a laptop to join.
  

  Speaker: Cindy Schwartz, Senior Manager Customer Solutions, AWS