The format is intimate by design, which makes for more honest conversations than you typically get at a trade show. We had a great day catching up with technology leaders from some of Australia’s leading enterprises and government organisations, comparing notes on what’s actually keeping them up at night.
The short answer: it’s foundations.
The AI ambition is real. So is the gap.
ADAPT’s research, presented on the day, put a number to something we hear constantly in our own conversations. Forty per cent of Australian CIOs identify data foundations as their single biggest constraint to scaling agentic AI. Not the models, not the budget, but the underlying infrastructure, data quality, and governance maturity required to make AI work at enterprise scale.
That stat landed hard, because everyone in the room recognised it. Boards are pressing for AI transformation. Meanwhile, around 40% of mission-critical applications still run on legacy infrastructure, and half of employees can’t reliably access trusted data to do their jobs. You can’t build intelligent operations on top of that.
The governance conversation was equally candid. With only 7% of Australian CIOs reporting enterprise-wide AI governance with board involvement, most organisations are still figuring out the frameworks as they go. The Atlassian session made a useful point here: the organisations actually seeing returns from AI aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated models — they’re the ones that have done the patient work of connecting context, cleaning data, and embedding AI into real workflows rather than running it as a parallel experiment.
What this means for infrastructure and security
None of this was a surprise to us. At Orro, we spend a lot of time helping highly complex organisations to navigate exactly this challenge. AI ambition is inseparable from infrastructure and security fundamentals. Real-time intelligence requires connected, trusted data. Agentic workflows operating across hybrid environments need visibility and control at every layer. And secure digital infrastructure (across both IT and OT) is the foundation everything else sits on.
The CIOs in that room weren’t looking for more AI tools. They were asking harder questions: How do we know what’s happening across our environment? How do we govern agents we’ve given real authority to? How do we prove value to a CFO who’s heard the pitch before?
Those are the right questions. And they’re the ones we’re built to help answer.
Worth the trip
CIO Edge Sydney was a good event. The research was solid, the format encouraged genuine peer exchange, and the quality of organisations and senior leaders in the room was exceptionally high. We came away with a clearer sense of where Australian enterprise technology is at right now, and plenty of material for follow-up conversations.
If any of those themes are live in your organisation right now, we’d welcome the conversation.
Stuart Long, Orro, Chief Technology Officer
