The Emanate Great AI Debate
Description
Emanate Technology invites you to The AI Debate, a lively evening of wit, conviction and spirited argument.
Digital literacy once separated those who kept up from those left behind. Now six of Canberra’s sharpest tech minds go head to head on whether understanding AI draws the next line: Is AI Literacy the New Digital Literacy?
Steered by our master of ceremonies, two teams will make their case and fight for every point. No scripts, no filters and certainly no hiding behind a chatbot.
You're not just a guest, you’ll judge and adjudicate the arguments to cast the vote that decides the winning team.
The evening is fully catered. Spaces are strictly limited and by invitation only, so secure your ticket now and getting ready to weigh the arguments!
Lineup
Yash Varma
Event MC: Yash Varma is Founder and General Partner of Empress Capital, an Australian venture capital firm focused on AI. Its first fund invested in Anthropic in 2024. Before Empress, Yash built and exited Spaarks, a global software consultancy serving clients including Deutsche Bank and Philips. He is also an active angel investor and high-performance coach for founders and executives. His current focus is the Empress Rewire Fund, which combines venture capital and private equity approaches to AI: acquiring established, profitable businesses and redesigning them around AI, alongside investing at the AI frontier. As MC of Emanate Technology's Canberra AI Debate, Yash brings a founder, operator and investor's perspective to the practical, ethical and economic questions shaping AI's role in business and society.
Rodney Loo
Rodney is an AI Transformation Lead at the University of Canberra, where he helps a large organisation work out how to use AI well, not just quickly. With more than 20 years in technology across Australian public sector organisations, including CSIRO, IP Australia and the Department of Health and Aged Care, he has seen how new tools succeed or stall depending on whether people understand them. He thinks of himself as an AI transformation architect rather than a pure engineer: someone who connects technology, people and governance into a working whole. On the question of AI literacy, his view comes from practice. Access to a tool is easy. Knowing when to trust it, when to question it, and when to put it down is the harder skill.
Olga Lysenko
Olga is a data and digital leader with over 25 years of experience delivering business value through responsive and reliable technology solutions across both the public and private sectors. Throughout her career, she has focused on connecting data, people and technology to enhance human capability, improve decision-making, and align ICT outcomes with broader business strategies. She is passionate about data, information and analytics, and the role they play in driving better decisions and improving services. Olga is committed to addressing business needs through collaboration, fostering a sense of achievement within teams, and creating opportunities for people to learn, grow and succeed. Her approach brings together strategic thinking, practical delivery and a strong focus on people and outcomes. Most recently, Olga led the development of an Enterprise Data Strategy that is now being implemented across the organisation. She also led the development and delivery of AI governance and AI literacy training for Senior Executives, helping build organisational understanding and capability in the responsible adoption of AI. Wherever she works, Olga is passionate about helping people see the value and potential of data, inspiring greater engagement with information, analytics and emerging technologies to support better organisational outcomes.
Fanpeng Kong, PhD
Dr Fanpeng Kong is a Solutions Architect at Databricks and a technical leader with over six years' experience designing and delivering cloud-native data and AI platforms for enterprise and government clients across Australia. He brings deep hands-on expertise in Databricks, Delta Lake, and the modern data lakehouse, combined with a track record of leading complex pre-sales engagements, proof-of-concept delivery, and architecture advisory across the public and private sectors. Before joining Databricks, Fanpeng held senior technical leadership roles, including Executive Director, Technical at Synergy Group and Principal AI Architect and Emerging Technology Practice Lead at DXC Technology, where he led data science and ML teams and shaped generative AI and modern data platform offerings for enterprise and government clients. He began his career in research, completing a PhD and postdoctoral work in Electrical Engineering at UNSW Canberra focused on real-time signal and image processing on FPGA-based systems.
Jason Pye
With more than 25 years of executive leadership across commercial, advisory and governance roles, Jason is the founder and CEO of Mode AI, an Australian company that builds AI products and platforms for businesses and government across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Its work spans large-scale AI for a global manufacturer, operations platforms for construction, custom AI models, cloud cost governance, and AI solutions for the fitness, hospitality and property development sectors. Alongside its product work, Mode AI helps organisations make sense of AI and adopt it with clarity, confidence and care through strategy and workforce upskilling. Jason regularly leads AI training for executive teams and staff, from national franchise networks to enterprise technology teams, including structured programs that take non-technical people through the foundations of AI and machine learning. That work gives him a grounded view of what AI literacy really looks like inside organisations, and of the gap between having access to AI tools and knowing how to use them well. His main personal interest in AI is machine learning, and he is completing postgraduate study in AI at Charles Sturt University. Before founding Mode AI, Jason spent 15 years as CEO of Trek Bicycle Australia and New Zealand, growing it into Australia's largest bicycle brand. He led a $180 million business with more than 500 staff, with full responsibility for profit and loss, multi-site operations, supply chains and retail network development. Earlier in his career, Jason worked with the ACT Auditor General's Office, as a Senior Manager in audit and advisory at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and at the Australian Sports Commission, advising national sporting organisations on strategy, governance and commercialisation. He is a CPA Associate and a Non-Executive Director of Collective Wellness Group, which operates Anytime Fitness in Australia and the UK. This version contains only details from the text you provided and doesn't add any new qualifications, achievements, descriptors, dates, links, contact details, or personal attributes.
Sophie Wright
Sophie Wright has spent more than 20 years working out how government can use technology to make things easier for people, rather than simply adding another system, process or acronym. She is currently Product Manager for GovAI Chat at the Department of Finance, helping shape a generative AI product designed specifically for the Australian Public Service. Her focus is practical: what AI is genuinely useful for, what is still hype, and how government can adopt it safely without making it so complicated that nobody wants to use it. Sophie has led digital transformation across some of the Australian Government’s most complex environments, including health, elections, foreign investment, passports, consumer data rights and national security-related programs. She is also Co-Founder of Jude Digital. Her work now sits at the intersection of AI, product, transformation and public-sector delivery, with a particular interest in how good design, strong governance and human judgement can turn AI from an interesting experiment into something people actually trust and use. Sophie speaks openly about what teams are learning as AI moves from strategy plans into real workplaces and teams. Key questions she’s focusing on include: what should we automate, what should remain human, how do we know an AI product is actually helping, and how do we build AI with users rather than simply for them?
Tony Schofield
Tony Schofield is a Canberra-based data professional who has spent his career at the intersection of engineering, architecture, and impact. He is currently a Senior Solutions Engineer for Federal Government at Snowflake, where he works with public sector agencies to design and adopt modern data and AI platforms so they can achieve the outcomes decision-makers actually care about. Before moving into his solutions engineering role, Tony was Principal Data Engineer at the Australian Institute of Sport, where he led the effort to modernise their legacy data platforms. He architected a modern data foundation that pulled fragmented performance, athlete, and operational data into a single trusted source. This moved High Performance Sport in Australia away from its scattered spreadsheets and silos towards a more secure and governed stance that also allowed a higher quality and speed of decision making.
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