# Adoption, cost & value — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

> Make adoption useful beyond the first enthusiastic users. Explore model rollout, budgets and permissions, the limits of activity metrics, product strategy and the organisational changes that turn AI investment into better outcomes.

Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/topics/adoption-value/
Program status: The working timetable is public. Announced speakers and presentations are confirmed; some track assignments, session groupings and times may change as keynote, partner and specialist sessions are finalised. Morning keynote programmes and Industry sessions will be added as they are confirmed.

## Published talks

- [Running AI Coding Agents at Scale: Adopting New Models, Controlling Cost, and Governing What Agents Do](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/anthony-ivan/) — Anthony Ivan
  Running coding agents across a company comes down to three questions: which models to offer, how to control cost, and what agents should be allowed to do. This talk gives four recommendations on those questions, drawn from running coding agents for 12,000 employees at Databricks. Offer new models early, and let data choose the default: every model reaches…
- [Token usage is the new lines of code (and it's just as useless)](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/fawaz-ahmad/) — Fawaz Ahmad
  Canva hit mid-2026 with every AI metric a vendor could hand us and no answer to the only question the business actually cared about: is this working? Adoption flattened at around 85% of ~3,000 engineers, and the number stopped telling us anything. AI touched 43% of PRs, PR volume was up 44% year over year (and growing week-over-week), but none of us could…
- [The Contradictions of Building AI Products and Teams](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/sherif-mansour/) — Sherif Mansour
  For every claim about how to build with AI, there seems to be an equal and opposite claim that’s also true. Chat is the universal interface, so go headless. Never bolt AI onto your product, reimagine it. Everyone on your team should become an AI builder. Sherif Mansour has spent 17 years at Atlassian. He now runs AI platform across its 20+ apps, nearly 10…
- [Lessons from Amazon's AI Journey](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/matt-taylor/) — Matt Taylor
  Learn how AWS transformed for and with AI with lessons learn around strategy, operating model, data foundations, governance, measurement, and change management.
- [The AI Theory of Constraints](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/shawn-wang/) — Shawn Wang
  
- [Lessons from Economics for the Human / Agent Software Workforce](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/daniel-nadasi/) — Daniel Nadasi
  AI is reshaping software engineering, creating uncertainty about how engineering roles will change as increasingly capable systems take on work that was once performed by people. While no one can predict the future with certainty, history offers examples of how technical innovation has transformed work in other industries and provides useful ways to think…
- [The Model Wasn't the MOAT: How 10 Design System Engineers Turned Platform Knowledge into Enterprise AI](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/sudharsanam-narasimhan/) — Sudharsanam Narasimhan
  Most enterprise AI strategies begin with models, central AI teams, and a list of potential use cases. We started somewhere else: with a platform organisation that already shaped how more than 2,000 frontend engineers built software. A team of 10 engineers working across design systems, internationalisation, and accessibility had something a general-purpose…
- [An AI-Assisted Brand Uplift at Scale](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/guilherme-epifanio/) — Guilherme Epifanio & Sam Annand
  What if designers could build directly in the codebase? We used AI-assisted workflows to let designers prototype in production code with live preview links, while engineers focused on feasibility and scale. The result: a full brand uplift shipped in four weeks, with every role playing to its strengths.

Topic groupings connect talks across the programme. For session times, rooms and tracks, see the [schedule](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/schedule/). Programme details remain subject to change.

- [Explore the whole programme](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/program/)
- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)