The nearest delivered work, and what it was
Rahim opened a regional leadership retreat in Istanbul with a keynote in front of the ANZ leadership team of Kaplan University Partnerships, its partner universities and its priority recruitment agency partners. Tom Dunlop, its General Manager for Global Student Recruitment in ANZ, described it: “He went well beyond the brief, interviewing students and families directly so he could tell us what was happening on the ground rather than what we assumed from our own data.”
How to read this. That engagement was delivered in Istanbul for an Australian and New Zealand leadership team, which is why it is described that way rather than as Australian work.
Australia's standard is voluntary, and it says so in its own words
The Department of Industry, Science and Resources publishes a Voluntary AI Safety Standard built on ten guardrails. Guardrail 5 is “Enable human control or intervention in an AI system to achieve meaningful human oversight”, and Guardrail 10 asks an organisation to define and document the stages of the AI lifecycle where meaningful human oversight is needed.
Its status is stated by the department without hedging: “Being voluntary, the standard does not create new legal duties about AI systems or their use.” That sentence is worth reading aloud in an Australian boardroom, because a guardrail framework that creates no duty is often presented internally as though it did.
The Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence reported on 26 November 2024. Its recommendation 5 asks that the definition of high-risk AI “clearly includes the use of AI that impacts on the rights of people at work”, and recommendation 6 that the existing work health and safety framework be extended to workplace AI risks. Recommendations, not law.
The duty that does bite, and the section everyone cites instead
A widely repeated claim is that section 145A of the Fair Work Act requires consultation before introducing technology. It does not. Section 145A is headed “Consultation about changes to rosters or hours of work”, and no section of the Act requires a major-change consultation term at all.
The duty lives in the modern awards, which the Commission may include under section 139. The Clerks Private Sector Award, clause 38, reads: “If an employer makes a definite decision to make major changes in production, program, organisation, structure or technology that are likely to have significant effects on employees, the employer must…” The load-bearing word for this argument is technology, and it is in operative text.
And the limit that matters commercially. That duty reaches award-covered and agreement-covered employees. It does not reach award-free senior and executive staff. So the people most likely to have AI change their work first are the people the consultation obligation does not cover, which is a governance gap rather than a drafting accident.
Twelve per cent, and the number that is not it
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that around 12 per cent of Australian businesses used AI in their workplace in 2024 to 2025, against 1 per cent in 2021 to 2022. By size: 35 per cent of large businesses, up from 9 per cent; 22 per cent of medium, up from 3; and about 11 per cent of small and micro. Information, media and telecommunications leads at 38 per cent. From the Business Characteristics Survey, a biennial survey of nearly 7,000 businesses run between October 2025 and February 2026.
A second set of figures circulates and is not the same series. Numbers in the region of 18, 19, 28 and 37 per cent by business size describe the innovation-active subset only. Innovation-active businesses sit at 20 per cent adoption against 6 per cent for the rest. Mixing the two produces a picture of Australian adoption roughly three times the real one, and it is an easy mistake because both sets come from the same release.
The duty that is coming, and is not here yet
The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 inserts Australian Privacy Principles 1.7 to 1.9, which require a privacy policy to disclose where “the entity has arranged for a computer program to make, or do a thing that is substantially and directly related to making, a decision” that affects rights or interests.
It commences 10 December 2026, twenty-four months after assent, confirmed both in the Act's own commencement table and on the OAIC's guidance page. The in-force compilation of the Privacy Act still carries APP 1.1 to 1.6 only.
So the correct sentence in September 2026 is that this commences in December, not that it requires anything today. Legacy systems are caught from day one, which is the part worth putting in front of a board now rather than in December.
The three keynotes a Sydney room can book
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences; the full argument needs 40 or more. The sector examples change for the room; the argument does not. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
Most organisations are adopting AI by drift: a thousand reasonable decisions that add up to judgement nobody chose to give away. Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills, shows leaders which mode they are running, where AI sharpens judgement and where it weakens it, and hands them the controls.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
AI makes everyone faster, stronger and more capable. It does not decide; people do. Through a family story across four generations and three continents, Rahim Hirji hands the audience the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. They arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Business is being rewired as AI arrives, and human judgement is leaving with it. In three acts, Rahim Hirji shows a board what AI is changing in how organisations run, then ends with a live test of the board's own judgement, in the room and in real time. Nobody forgets the result.
Where these sessions happen in Sydney, and when they can
Capacities are the venue's own published figures, read on the venue's own site.
- ICC Sydney
- The Darling Harbour Theatre seats 2,500 tiered, and the Grand Ballroom in its full configuration takes 2,784. The centre can run three self-sufficient concurrent conventions, and its own FAQ notes an adjacent hotel of around 600 rooms fifty metres from the entrance. Its capacity sheet carries the sensible caveat that room capacities are subject to event refinements.
- The Fullerton Hotel Sydney
- The Grand Ballroom holds 1,400 in theatre style across 1,058 square metres, which the hotel describes as Sydney's largest pillarless hotel space. Direct access for a car display, an exclusive adjoining foyer, and delegates sleeping upstairs in the former General Post Office on Martin Place.
- Doltone House, Darling Island
- Up to 1,100 theatre style. Ground level with boat access and cars permitted on site, and divisible into two, so a plenary and a breakout run in one hire. Note the venue publishes different total-guest figures on its wedding and business pages for the same room.
- Luna Park Sydney, the Big Top
- Up to 750 theatre style, with an in-house immersive rig of 38 projectors, three LED screens and event audio. Catering is through an external panel of three caterers rather than in-house, which changes the budget shape.
- Sydney Town Hall, and why no single number appears here
- The City of Sydney publishes five different theatre capacities for Centennial Hall on its own pages: 2,000 as a headline, 2,008 with the galleries and no stage extension, 1,924 with the extension, 1,396 on the ground floor alone, and 1,312 on the ground floor with a stage extension. They reconcile, and the practical consequence is that a corporate keynote with a built stage on the ground floor is a 1,312-seat room rather than a 2,000-seat one, a difference of about thirty-five per cent. An audio desk on the floor removes twelve more. The City is the exclusive audiovisual supplier.
The Australian year has a structural hole in it, and a London organiser proposing dates without knowing that will propose the wrong ones. Combine six weeks of NSW summer school holidays from 21 December 2027, four public holidays inside the last week of December, and the ordinary Christmas shutdown, and mid-December to the first week of February is effectively closed to a corporate conference. NSW students return on Wednesday 3 February 2027.
The financial year runs 1 July to 30 June, so a new budget opens on 1 July 2027. Australia Day falls on Tuesday 26 January 2027 and fragments that week. Anzac Day falls on Sunday 25 April 2027 with an additional public holiday on Monday the 26th.
Published 2027 dates. Vivid Sydney runs 28 May to 19 June 2027 across several precincts and carries a business and ideas strand. Legal Innovation and Tech Fest is 28 to 29 April 2027 at the Hyatt Regency. CeMAT Australia and Industrial Transformation Australia run 27 to 29 July 2027 at the Sydney Showground.
Two that have gone, and one that is not in Sydney. SXSW Sydney has folded: its domain now redirects to SXSW and the organiser's own footer lists no Sydney property. CeBIT Australia is discontinued and its domain redirects to the organiser's Australian arm, where it no longer appears. And Gartner's Australian IT Symposium is on the Gold Coast, roughly nine hundred kilometres away, which is worth checking before anybody books a Sydney room around it. Sibos 2027 is Singapore.
Best windows for 2027: late February to mid March, early May to early June, late July to mid September, and mid October to late November.
