Coming to the tailend of August means a few big things in Brisbane - RiverFire is normally only a few weeks ago, the flu season is winding down after everyone got sick at the EKKA and Something Tech is back in town.
The city really turned on some stunning weather for bringing together the masses from the tech, startup, innovation and growth scenes in not just Brisbane. Interestingly the event is now starting to be recognised Australia wide and it has started cementing itself in people’s calendars each year. Being my first conference as the newest member of the team at Gaia Resources I saw it as a great opportunity to get amongst it, learn from some extremely talented people and meet some great operators from around Australia.
Highlights of day one:
Louise Monger from Schneider Electric kicked the day off by looking at megatrends impacting the future including:
- a global rebalance,
- infrastructure development,
- digitalisation and AI; and
- The inevitable energy transition and our opportunity to lean into these impacts (a stellar presentation all round).
Geoff Main from Passionberry Marketing ran a marketing strategy reset for those of us engaged in the marketing conversation on the daily. Which honestly is most people involved in small to medium businesses. My main takeaway was to focus on getting the basics right and not getting distracted by shiny things. After all, it's better to lock down 3 things than get distracted by 12 shiny things you can never complete and only do halfheartedly. The session was so in demand it ended up running extra long with Geoff sitting down to help answer burning questions from the audience who were enthralled with his presentation.
There was a solid panel on ‘AI NOW - Beyond the Hype | Scaling AI’. Whilst we didn’t land on a general consensus across the board on the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). With some more bullish people on the panel advocating for all AI, all the time, being counteracted by two or three more conservative approaches that it is good at somethings but still a long way off being a utopian dream. Lots of discussion about mathematical limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) being essentially that we do NOT have the computational power to get hallucinations down to a level that most legal teams and businesses will be willing to sign off on so unless we develop a new approach we may be hitting a ceiling on LLM robustness for now.
Highlights of day two:
An early morning basketball session with founders and tech leaders - a chance to get out of comfort zones, work up a sweat, shoot some hoops and chat with like minded people is rarely a bad thing.
Irene McAleese from See.Sense presented a great talk about the increased ability through Internet of Things (IOT) senses to track and measure non-vehicle journeys on roadways and petition for changes to infrastructure before deaths happen. Currently the only way governments know of issues on infrastructure for cyclists etc is lagging indicators like accidents or death - it shouldn’t take that long to pre-empt issues or risks lives to achieve this goal. See.Sense have also released 1,000 sensors to Melbourne council and tracking now with great success - wonderful hearing about world changing innovation in our own back yard.
Troy Flower from Wellteam talked about the nature of investment and looking for return - with this in mind wouldn’t it be great if as an outcome of the upcoming Olympics we left behind the fittest, happiest and healthiest population instead of just infrastructure or debt. Troy talked about following lots of basic habits to drive not just survival but instead to actively thrive - this thought of health and happiness as an output of life really resonated with me.
Mike Langford from Google Cloud gave a presentation on the ‘agentic tomorrow’ which really hit the mark and demonstrated some great leaps and bounds in the AI space and talked about Google’s long term commitment to LLMs and AI. He ended the presentation with some generative video to demonstrate improvements from where these tools were just 12 months ago when ‘Will Smith spaghetti’ was causing so many issues and the difference to now was honestly astounding.
Alison Stokes of Beyond Clinic talked about using technology to bridge the gap in health care. In 100 years technology has advanced so much but so much manual delivery work is still hampered by fax machines, paper forms and unwillingness to engage design think (and technology) to solve problems which will be needed if we’re to keep up with an aging population.
Steve Allan of Blue Corridor Ventures finished off the program with a sobering look at the the ‘why’ behind the AI investment boom and why he thinks it will continue even if we are seeing reports like MIT saying 95% of AI projects are not delivering returns
Big Wins - the networking and location was amazing. Between meeting people I haven't seen in 10 years, meeting business leaders over a game of basketball or meeting people new to Brisbane and the ecosystem it was all a win. Looking forward to an even bigger Something Tech in 2026 and seeing what the team pulls together next time.
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Jarrad