Beyond the Pilot: From Potential to Profit
As a major sponsor of the AFR AI Summit 2026, Allens supported a timely discussion on AI moving from experimentation to delivering real, measurable business value.
The summit explored how organisations are moving beyond ‘AI washing’ to practical implementation, while grappling with broader implications for jobs, productivity and the rise of advanced AI such as AGI. Set against the backdrop of significant global investment in data centre infrastructure and growing importance of sovereign AI capability. Experts reflected on lessons from the first wave of adoption and defining the next phase of an AI-driven economy.
Five key themes that emerged
- AI’s social licence – Trust is emerging as a critical issue for both AI infrastructure and the use of AI applications. There is growing concern on how AI uses resources, impacts society and whether benefits are shared fairly across the economy.
- Australia should build, not rent, its AI capability – Strong alignment across speakers that some form of sovereign capability is essential to ensure economic value, control and resilience are retained locally.
- Copyright remains a key unresolved barrier – Commentary on how the current copyright legal settings potentially risk deterring model training in Australia, and a genuine tension between enabling innovation and ensuring creators are fairly and properly rewarded.
- Impact on people and the leadership challenge – Successful AI implementation is hard, and requires top-down leadership, organisational redesign, and careful management of workforce capacity and cognitive load.
- Increasing focus on ROI – A growing focus on monitoring the cost of token usage as AI pricing models begin to evolve, and ensuring AI delivers tangible business value by testing the ROI.
Panel: Winning the AI infrastructure race
Australia aims to be a regional AI infrastructure powerhouse, with data centre operators, neocloud providers and AI factories among the hottest investment themes. However, challenges regarding the resources required to deliver the digital dividend remain unsolved.
Allens partner David Donnelly joined Co-founder & Co-CEO of IREN Daniel Roberts, CEO & MD of Origin Energy, Frank Calabria and CEO of Data Centres Australia, Belinda Dennett.
Watch the session
The full panel discussion featuring David Donnelly is available below.