SAP Connect Day for Data & IT ANZ: Sydney
Unify data, apps, and AI – faster
17 March 2026 | The Crown
17 March 2026 | 8:45 am - 4:00 pm
The Crown, 1 Barangaroo Avenue, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
Turn Complexity into Agility with Connected Data and AI
IT leaders are under pressure to drive innovation while increasing agility in an increasingly complex, AI-driven world. Join us to discover how technology leaders are connecting applications, data and AI to build intelligent, adaptive enterprises that thrive in constant change.
You’ll learn how to:
Harmonise SAP and non-SAP data to create a trusted foundation for AI
Unlock real-time insights by unifying data across systems
Automate core processes to drive agility and resilience
Modernise ERP with industry-specific, AI-enabled capabilities
Maximise the value of AI, data and applications through a business technology platform
Join us in Sydney on 17 March 2026 at Crown Sydney for a high-impact day of keynotes, customer stories and solution deep dives designed for CIOs, CTOs, architects and digital leaders looking to turn complexity into competitive advantage.
Meet 1-on-1 with Expert Partners
As part of the event, we've created a one-stop shop for expert advice, giving you the unique opportunity to schedule 1-on-1 meetings with our key partners throughout the day. This curated group offers a wide spectrum of expertise, from technical solution specialists to strategic implementation partners who drive transformation and innovation.
You can meet with a single partner for a targeted discussion or book time with multiple experts to gain a comprehensive view. This is an unparalleled opportunity to efficiently gather diverse, tailored insights in a single, convenient setting.
To book your meetings, indicate which partners you would like to meet during registration, and we’ll handle the scheduling.
Who Should Attend
This event is designed for senior technology and digital leaders who are shaping the future of their organisations, including:
CIOs, CTOs and Heads of IT
Enterprise and Solution Architects
Data, Analytics and AI Leaders
Digital Transformation and Innovation Leaders
Technology and Platform Owners
If you are responsible for modernising systems, unlocking data-driven insight, or enabling AI at scale, this event is for you.
Please note: attendance for partners is limited to sponsoring partners only.
Thought Leader Speakers
STEPHEN SCHEELER | THE DIGITAL CEO
Stephen Scheeler is Australia’s leading authority on AI, technology, disruption and leadership. Former CEO of Facebook Australia & New Zealand, he helped scale the business into one of Facebook’s most successful global markets, working closely with Silicon Valley leadership.
Today, Stephen is Founder of The Digital CEO, Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Company, Executive-in-Residence at AGSM, and Co-Founder and CEO of Omniscient, a global leader in AI-driven brain intelligence.
Join us in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane to hear Stephen share insights into how AI is reshaping leadership, decision-making, and the future of intelligent enterprises.
LUKE NIXON | HEAD OF PRODUCT GROWTH | SAP RESEARCH & INNOVATION
Luke Nixon is Head of Product Growth for SAP Research & Innovation, where he identifies emerging technology trends and applies them to high-impact business opportunities for SAP customers.
His work focuses on technologies that will shape the market over the next three years, helping SAP innovators prioritise what matters most.
Join us in Sydney and Brisbane to hear Luke explore how agility and intelligence have become critical competitive advantages, and to share SAP’s vision for the intelligent enterprise, where data flows seamlessly across applications, insights drive real-time action, and AI is embedded in business processes to reimagine the end-to-end value chain.
NICLAS SCHLAUTKOETTER | SVP, ADOPTION GENERAL MANAGER - DATA & AI | SAP
Niclas Schlautkoetter is a seasoned business technology leader with over 20 years at SAP, specialising in hybrid data, analytics, and AI architectures for large enterprise environments. He has a strong track record advising global customers on data strategy and leading complex, multi-year SAP transformation programs.
As SVP and Adoption General Manager for SAP Data & AI, Niclas focuses on helping customers realise tangible value from their data investments by accelerating adoption and driving measurable business outcomes. Previously, he served as Chief Architect and Global Head of Strategic Architecture Advisory for SAP Business Data Cloud, where he led global architecture teams supporting strategic customer cloud transformations and close alignment with SAP Product Engineering.
COLLEEN HEBBERT | HEAD OF CYBER GOVERNANCE ANZ | SAP
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, governance and risk leaders are increasingly at the centre of critical decisions, often navigating new territory without fit-for-purpose tools.
In this practical and timely session, Colleen will explore how SAP Business AI embeds security, compliance and ethical safeguards by design.
She will unpack SAP’s approach to responsible AI, outline the evolving risk landscape, and provide actionable guidance on assessing and mitigating AI-related risk within SAP environments - equipping leaders to drive AI adoption with confidence, transparency and trust.
THOMAS PFIESTER | HEAD OF CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT & ADOPTION AND MEMBER OF THE EXTENDED BOARD | SAP SE
Thomas Pfiester leads SAP’s global Customer Engagement & Adoption organisation, helping customers modernise ERP, adopt clean-core principles, and accelerate AI-enabled transformation at scale.
In this session, he will share the latest enhancements to SAP’s Support and Services portfolio, including SAP Success Plans, and how a proactive, prescriptive partnership model reduces complexity, manages risk and drives measurable value. Joined by Stephen Scheeler, The Digital CEO, the discussion will explore how organisations can simplify transformation and scale innovation with confidence.
- Speaker 1
- Speaker 2
- Speaker 3
- Speaker 4
- Speaker 5
The Agenda
- Keynote & Plenary
- Theatrette 1 - Innovate & Elevate with AI
- Theatrette 2 - Path to Simplicity with SAP Build and Integration Suite
- Theatrette 3 - Redefining Data and Analytics for AI
- Theatrette 4: Design for Agility & Transformation
In a world bombarded by AI, disruption, and constant change, your most valuable assets are attention and focus. But how do you find clarity amid the chaos?
Stephen Scheeler, founder of The Digital CEO, who navigated Facebook's hypergrowth and now builds a world-changing AI company, provides a masterclass in cutting through the noise. This isn't a theoretical lecture; it's a battle-tested playbook from the trenches.
Through gripping inside stories and simple, powerful lessons, you will learn how to ask the right questions, make faster decisions, and lead with a human-centric focus that turns chaos into your competitive advantage.
Keynote Speaker: Stephen Scheeler | The Digital CEO
In this session, SAP Services leader Thomas Pfiester, Head of Customer Engagement & Adoption and Member of the Extended Board, SAP SE will delve into the latest enhancements across our Support and Services portfolio, including SAP Success Plans, designed to accelerate transformation, maximise adoption, and unlock measurable value from your SAP investments.
You’ll hear how a more proactive, prescriptive partnership model helps reduce complexity, manage risk and drive faster outcomes. Joining the discussion, Stephen Scheeler, The Digital CEO, will share his perspective on how organisations can leverage these new services to simplify change, scale AI responsibly and make transformation more achievable.
Speakers:
Stephen Scheeler | The Digital CEO
Thomas Pfiester | Head of Customer Engagement & Adoption and Member of the Extended Board | SAP SE
In today’s world of relentless disruption, agility and intelligence are the ultimate competitive advantages. Discover how you can transform unpredictability into opportunity; not by chasing trends, but by grounding innovation in integrated use cases across data, applications, and AI. In this session, we will take you through SAP’s bold vision for the intelligent enterprise, where data flows freely across applications, insights drive action in real time, and AI is embedded into business processes, creating a new, reimagined value chain.
Speaker: Luke Nixon | Head of Product Growth | SAP Research & Innovation
Business data fabric is an architectural approach that connects data across multiple clouds and platforms while preserving mission-critical business context, enabling trusted, harmonised data for analytics, AI, data integration, and operational decision-making at scale.
This keynote will share the latest on the SAP Data Ecosystem and how SAP Business Data Cloud unifies SAP and non-SAP data into a single, business-ready foundation. Learn what this evolution means, how it simplifies increasingly complex data landscapes, and how organisations are already leveraging it to build better insights, accelerate AI-driven use cases, and turn data into meaningful business outcomes.
Speaker: Niclas Schlautkoetter | General Manager, SAP Data & AI Adoption | SAP
With the S/4HANA migration complete, Downer is now perfectly positioned to shift from "operating" to "innovating." This next phase is where the real transformation happens, incrementally. Leveraging an Integrated Tool Chain with BTM for seamless execution, infusing BTP and AI to accelerate delivery, and adopting Cloud ALM to keep your delivery agile. Not to forget turning SAP and non-SAP data, to insights with SAP BDC.
How do you eat the big S/4HANA transformation elephant? One bite at a time!
Speakers:
Nicklas Moller | Head of ERP | Downer Group
Mehrab Ebadi | Founder & Managing Director | Fair Consulting Group
Cloud and AI transformation is more than a system upgrade - it’s a chance to strengthen agility, insight, and business resilience. The difference between complexity and clarity often comes down to one critical factor: how well you connect process and content.
As organisations modernise their SAP environments, decades of legacy data and fragmented content can increase cost, risk, and friction. High-performing enterprises take a strategic approach: aligning content with their SAP cloud roadmap, supporting a clean core, intelligently archiving what’s not needed, and embedding governance by design.
In this session, you will explore how to:
• Unify process and content to create a trusted, single source of truth
• Control data growth while reducing compliance risk
• Build an AI-ready content foundation that enables automation, insight, and confident decision-making
Walk away with a clear framework to modernise with control, confidence, and clarity — and unlock high performance in the age of AI.
Speaker: Susan Tasic-Clark | Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting | OpenText
This session cuts through the hype to explain agentic AI in SAP, showing how it operates within governed business processes with clear decision rights, auditability, and control.
We’ll explore a practical SAP-friendly framework (intent → steps → actions → learning → escalation) and introduce three operating models: Human-in-the-Loop, Human-Out-of-the-Loop, and Human-Informing-the-Loop.
The session also reframes the “perfect data” myth, highlighting how agents succeed by leveraging context, boundaries, and oversight to enable faster, more accountable enterprise decision-making.
Speaker: Chris Rae | General Manager - SAP Practice | Atturra
Amid the relentless pursuit of AI initiatives, governance and risk leaders remain uncomfortably at the forefront of decision-making, often with tools and methods that don’t feel fit for purpose. More than ever, enterprises need a foundation of trust with their technology partners that delivers greater transparency and a radical form of “share faith” recognising we all have much at stake.
This session explores, in practical terms, how SAP Business AI is embedding security, compliance, and ethical safeguards into its intelligent technologies. Attendees will gain insights into SAP’s approach to responsible AI, understand the evolving risk landscape, and learn how to assess and mitigate AI-related risks within their SAP environments.
Designed for those in positions of influence, such as governance and risk professionals, and for project leaders carrying adoption responsibilities, this session will provide practical insights and real-world examples to help assess risk, facilitate effective decision-making, and demystify the technical realm to enable more effective collaboration. Whether you're evaluating AI use cases or implementing AI-driven solutions, this session will equip you with the tools to ensure secure, compliant, and trustworthy AI adoption.
Speaker: Colleen Hebbert | Head of Cyber Governance ANZ | SAP
Hear from HCLTech SAP Practice leadership as we share practical insights into how, in partnership with SAP, we help organisations modernise their ERP, establish a clean core foundation, and transform the employee and customer experience. Drawing on real customer programs, we’ll demonstrate how a clean core strategy enables faster innovation, stronger governance and long-term agility.
During this session, we’ll highlight local customer references, share lessons learned from large-scale transformations, and outline practical steps to future-proof your SAP landscape through clean core principles, cloud adoption and intelligent automation.
Speaker: Kuldeep Singh | Lead Architect -Intelligent Enterprise- APJ | HCLTech
The "SaaS is dead" prophecy, fueled by the promise of autonomous AI agents, is creating legitimate concern. But what if the prophets are wrong?
This session will show you that AI agents will be a key efficiency driver in the coming years, but operating in a silo is a fantasy. True transformation requires a nervous system, a core of process intelligence and data integrity.
We’ll show how SAP’s 50-year legacy provides exactly that, acting as the essential control plane for AI. See how your SAP foundation isn’t the past; it’s the only reliable platform to launch the AI agents that will define the future.
Speaker: Lee Marshall | Head of AI | SAP ANZ
No matter if you're considering, in the middle of, or completing your S/4 upgrade, maximising your investment is essential. Join us for a session on programs and tools to enhance the value of your AI, data, and platform investments.
Learn how to accelerate transformations, control costs, and become an AI-ready enterprise.
Speaker: Anil Bhaskaran | Vice President - Solution Advisory, AI, Data & Platform, Asia Pacific | SAP
Join us for a journey into the latest Artificial Intelligence capabilities for your Business Suite powered by SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). This session will guide you through the transformative potential of AI in business, address business needs, showcase how BTP's AI capabilities and custom AI agents can drive innovation and efficiency in your organisation, and outline what we have planned for the future.
Speaker: Thorsten Freitag | Chief Innovation Architect | SAP ANZ
Innovators are harnessing the transformative power of Agentic AI to address complex and emerging business challenges with impressive ingenuity.
Accenture is partnering with SAP on industry use cases for AI. This approach leverages SAP AI technologies to optimise pricing strategies, enhance customer engagement and drive measurable business outcomes.
In this session, we will outline the customer problem, present our solution, and discuss the SAP components used to develop this agentic approach, as well as the broader impact on retail operations.
Speaker: Selim Ahmed | Managing Director, SAP Business Group | Accenture
Learn how upcoming innovations, third-party integrations, and customisation options from Joule help you interact in new ways and find the answers you need across your applications. Get deeper insight into the latest announcements regarding Joule and find out what powers them and how this is driving the delivery of a new UI for the era of agentic AI.
Speaker: Liam Mischewski | Sr. Solution Architect AI | SAP
Turn a flood of data complexity into a wellspring of business opportunity and build your AI confidence. Drive better business decision-making and customer experiences by maximising the value and quality of your data.
Join us for an exciting, feature‑rich session exploring how SAP AI has evolved to accelerate development and transformation projects. We will cover topics including Joule for Developers, MCP in Build Code, and ABAP use cases for generative AI. Whether you are a Fiori/UI5, CAP, or ABAP developer or an IT lead looking to enhance your team's productivity, this session offers valuable insights.
Speaker: Greg Carino | Sr. Solutions Architect | SAP ANZ
Discover SAP-RPT-1 ("Rapid One"), SAP’s cutting-edge relational pretrained transformer model designed for instant, code-free predictive insights on structured, tabular business data. Leveraging in-context learning, it handles classification and regression tasks without training, outperforming traditional ML models.
Accessible via API and a testing playground, SAP-RPT-1 empowers users to unlock predictive analytics effortlessly. Join this session to learn more about its capabilities and get started with this innovative solution.
Speaker: Liam Mischewski | Sr. Solution Architect AI | SAP
Discover how SAP Business Technology Platform brings together agent and application development, automation, integration, and AI capabilities into one unified environment, enabling rapid, upgrade-safe innovation through AI agents, process automation, extension development, and digital workspaces with built-in governance.
Speaker: Abhishek Nath | Sr. Advisor, SAP BTP Customer Success | SAP ANZ
SAP Integration Suite remains a core foundation of SAP’s integration strategy. In this session, we'll explore the latest innovations delivered in 2026, as well as the future investment areas and roadmap. We will also take a closer look at the AI strategy for SAP Integration Suite and how it accelerates and enables AI across the enterprise.
Whether you’re modernising legacy integrations or scaling for future growth, this session illustrates how SAP Integration Suite supports resilient, agile, and future‑ready integration strategies.
Speaker: Greg Carino | Senior Solutions Architect | SAP ANZ
SAP Build is SAP’s unified development and automation environment that empowers both professional and citizen developers to build applications, automate processes, and create AI-driven extensions using a combination of low‑code, pro‑code, and generative AI tools.
See SAP Build and the latest development in a demonstration illustrating how easy it is to build and extend an app across On-Prem or in the Cloud.
Speaker: Jason Tran | Solutions Engineer | SAP ANZ
SAP Document AI is an end‑to‑end intelligent document processing solution that automates the extraction, classification, and validation of structured and unstructured data across a wide range of business documents, reducing manual processing effort by up to 70%.
Powered by advanced OCR, pretrained transformers, and large language models, it delivers high‑accuracy data extraction, streamlines workflows through native integration with SAP applications, and accelerates productivity while lowering the total cost of ownership for enterprise document operations.
Speaker: Kynan Jones | Cloud Architect | SAP ANZ
The SAP Build Extensibility Wizard provides a unified, guided experience for extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors.
The wizard consolidates both on-stack and side-by-side extension options into a single interface and automatically filters APIs, events, and extension points based on the application's business context when it is launched. This streamlines extension discovery and accelerates development by integrating seamlessly with SAP Build tools, including SAP Build Apps, Process Automation, and SAP Build Code.
Speaker: Deloy Tran | Solutions Architect | SAP ANZ
Discover how the ABAP Cloud development model empowers you to build fast, stable, and upgrade‑safe extensions—without compromising your core system. Learn the latest clean‑core guidelines, and see how to transform legacy ABAP custom code into cloud‑compliant innovations.
Speaker: Amin Almarsafy | Sr. Advisor, SAP BTP | SAP ANZ
Data fuels innovation, but fragmented context slows progress. SAP Business Data Cloud simplifies how you unify, access, and leverage your SAP data with certified, curated data products. Learn about delivering trusted, high-quality data with comprehensive business context across your data and analytics ecosystem.
Speaker: Jon Gooding | APAC Business Data Cloud Solution Advisory | SAP
SAP Business Data Cloud is the evolution of our business data fabric strategy, supported by an open data ecosystem of leading technology partners that simplifies, connects, integrates, secures, and governs customers’ data and AI landscapes.
Together, we work to champion SAP’s business data fabric as a new industry standard for an interoperable, unified data strategy. Find out more about the recently announced SAP Business Data Cloud Connect, a service that integrates partner data platforms into the business data fabric and enables bidirectional, zero-copy sharing of data products with partner data platforms, plus the net new open data partner, Snowflake.
Speaker: Pierre Van Rooyen | Domain Advisor SAP BTP/ BDC | SAP
SAP serves as the essential foundation for business, providing a highly structured and trusted record of financials, supply chain, and customer history. As the robust engine of the enterprise, SAP ensures the data integrity and operational stability required for complex decision-making.
By integrating this environment with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, organisations can further amplify the value of their SAP investments. This synergy allows businesses to apply advanced AI and machine learning to their most reliable data, evolving a proven system of record into a proactive intelligence hub that drives sustained strategic growth.
Speaker:
Živilė Norkūnaitė | Sr Solutions Architect | Databricks
Enabling an AI-ready data fabric with SAP BDC
Enterprise planning and Insights are only as good as the data fabric they can leverage. SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) establishes a governed, semantically rich business data fabric that unifies SAP and non‑SAP data, creating a trusted foundation for SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) planning and analytics scenarios.
In this session, we show how organisations can make use of BDC Data Products and Intelligent Applications to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI), eliminate data duplication, preserve source semantics, and orchestrate planning & analytics across all departments. We will walk through a practical architecture and example scenario that combines BDC with SAP source systems and non-SAP platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake so you can simulate outcomes and steer your business using a live, business‑ready data fabric.
Speakers:
Andrew Pym | Head of Strategy, Data and AI | DyFlex Solutions
Christopher Kaszelik | Head of Planning & Analytics | DyFlex Solutions
SAP Business Data Cloud is the path forward for SAP Business Warehouse customers.
With SAP Business Data Cloud, you can lift your existing SAP BW system to the private cloud and secure your SAP BW investments while exposing SAP BW data as a data product for direct consumption and creating new use cases in SAP Datasphere or Databricks and any other approved/certified third-party application.
Speaker: Claudia Fiess | Senior Solution Consultant, SAP Analytics & Insight | SAP
Explore how SAP Business Data Cloud delivers prebuilt analytical apps with SAP data, predefined metrics, AI models, and planning capabilities. You can learn about accelerating mission-critical use cases, from optimising working capital to unifying workforce insights with SAP and third-party data.
Speaker: Tony Thorpe | Sr. Solution Architect | SAP
Many organisations are accelerating their move to S/4HANA. As they do, the importance of trusted data, clear governance, and a joined-up approach to managing and mobilising data becomes even more critical. Data quality and readiness are the most foundational drivers of timeline, cost, and business adoption.
This session explores how Syniti’s Data First approach enables S/4HANA customers to achieve a clean core, minimise migration risk, and set a foundation for long‑term innovation. We’ll walk through proven methodologies, real‑world transformation outcomes, and why leading enterprises now Expect More from their data. SAP S/4HANA users will gain practical guidance on preparing, governing, and migrating data to ensure a smooth, predictable, and value‑driven transition.
Speaker: James O'Donnell | Head of Sales | Syniti
Explore the latest AI and Agentic capabilities in SAP Business Suite and see how they help organizations unlock productivity gains at every stage of their journey.
Speaker: Murali Shanmugham | Global Business AI Strategy Advisor | SAP
Building your AI Governance Foundation - ensuring agility, increasing efficacy, and mitigating risk with SAP LeanIX
Technology is accelerating faster than organisations can absorb, and without the right capabilities, AI agents, despite their promise, risk becoming fragmented, ungoverned, and under‑utilised. Find out how a true Transformation Capability can help you gain visibility across your landscape, drive adoption and ensure value.
Speaker: Brett Jones | Director Solution Advisory SAP Signavio & SAP LeanIX | SAP
Gain insights from real-world experiences as we introduce our enhanced SAP Services and Support portfolio launching in January 2026. Whether you're adopting SAP Business-AI solutions, deploying Business Data Cloud, or transitioning to SAP Business Suite, discover the success plans available to support your ongoing innovation journey.
Speaker: Alan Beven | Chief Enterprise Architect | SAP ANZ
Sustainability isn't just about ticking boxes; it's about transforming data into decisions.
In this session, we’ll explore how organisations are evolving their sustainability reporting practices to drive real-world impact. We’ll showcase examples that highlight the challenges and breakthroughs in operationalising sustainability. Then, we’ll dive into how AI is reshaping the landscape—from automating data collection to enhancing calculation accuracy and surfacing actionable insights.
Speaker: Eamon Fenwick | Sr. Director, Supply Chain & Sustainability Advisor | SAP
This expert session provides an overview of SAP Joule for Consultants, an AI-powered assistant designed to enhance consultant productivity and problem-solving capabilities. Attendees learn how Joule consolidates knowledge, accelerates insights, and supports efficient project delivery with real customer success examples, feature deep dives, and guidance on activation and adoption.
Speaker: Murali Shanmugham | Global Business AI Strategy Advisor | SAP
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