AI-for-business summit · Melbourne
The AI Summit Australia 2026
“Which tool should we buy?” is the wrong question.
Most conversations about AI right now open with which tool to buy. We spent the show asking a better one: which part of your business is still held together by someone manually moving data between systems? That is the work agents should be doing. People brought their slowest manual workflows to Stand H5 and we talked each one through, including the ones where the honest answer was “don't automate that yet.”
About the show
The AI Summit Australia is Informa's AI-for-business event, the Australian stop on The AI Summit Series. The 2026 edition ran for three days at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, co-located with Data Center World Australia, and brought together 1,000+ attendees, 50+ speakers and 65+ sponsors and exhibitors across enterprise AI, infrastructure and applied agentic systems.
australia.theaisummit.com
The jars, fourth show running
Two jars, one question. “I'm worried about risk with AI” against “I'm excited about AI agents.” 80 percent went to excited, the widest margin we have seen. On its own, though, that number is misleading.
Excited, with conditions
Almost nobody who voted excited meant excited about AI running unsupervised. In conversation after conversation we heard the same four things: we want AI in daily operations, not in a pilot deck; we want productivity gains we can measure; we want humans in control of what matters; we want to know it is safe before it touches a customer.
Not whether. How.
That is not hesitation, it is maturity. Australia has stopped debating whether to adopt AI and moved to the harder question of how to do it responsibly. Which is the question we built AgentOS around: evals, guardrails, audit trails and monitoring, so an agent can be trusted with real work.
Sovereignty and the SME ecosystem
Two threads ran through the week. One was AI sovereignty: running the full stack in Australia, on Australian cloud infrastructure, so data and jurisdiction stay where they should. The other was the gap smaller businesses face in finding agentic AI providers they can trust, which we picked up with Natural Velocity, the AIIA on industry and government policy, and Nokia on the infrastructure underneath it all.
Australia is not debating whether to adopt AI. It is asking the harder question of how to do it responsibly.
Avesta Labs at The AI Summit Australia 2026
