The story of the iconic Sydney Opera House is one of unabridged ambition, sheer determination, collaboration, intense budgetary strain and eventually major controversy.
While today there stands a World-Heritage listed building, famous the world over, Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who designed the exterior sail structure, was forced into resigning before its completion due to budget overruns and subsequent political battles. He never got to see the building in person.
It’s a fascinating story, and one that our Australia and New Zealand community heard first hand as we were shown around the famous halls at the end of our 2026 Australia Forum that took place at the Opera House last week.
With case studies from Kimberley Fisk, CPO of New Zealand-headquartered dairy giant Fonterra, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia CPO Angela Connolly (pictured above), the morning got off to a strong start. Both were focused on how new technologies – namely AI – were being adopted and how the roles and capabilities of people were evolving as a result.
Both talked about their approach to driving AI adoption, with Angela sharing CommBank’s framework to “democratise, scale, redesign, leverage, scan, rinse and repeat”. Democratising means putting AI in everyone’s hands, sharing both successes and failures, and asking questions such as: “How can AI help me today?”
Scaling adoption means capturing and industrialising what works, ensuring there is a common repository of use cases, and that reusable prompts, agents and patterns are captured, and asking: “How do we make one person’s breakthrough everyone’s starting point?”
Redesigning approaches and workflows ensures teams challenge themselves with one simple question: “If we started from scratch, would we design this process the same way?” In most cases, the answer is likely to be, ‘probably not’.
Of course, the content of the framework makes sense and will ensure the CommBank team maintains clarity and consistency of thought amid dizzying technological jargon and hype. But it probably won’t be too dissimilar to others that have been created by CPO Crunch readers.
But it was the words of Transurban’s Mark Sheldrick that really stuck with me when I asked him to offer one piece of advice to CPOs tasked with rolling out AI. “Fairly simply, I’d say ‘keep calm,’” he said. Easier said than done, given everything going on, but I couldn’t agree more.
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