Siemens Australia held its annual digital conference, Digitalize 2018, on Wednesday 8 August at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The theme of this year’s event was ‘Unlock the Potential’, and centred around four sub-themes of:
1. Workforce of the Future
2. Industry 4.0
3. Intelligent Infrastructure
4. Australia’s Energy Transition
The full-day conference, with an audience of nearly 500, featured a host of global and local industry experts discussing how Australian businesses, across many sectors, can unlock their potential by utilising and embracing digitalisation.
Speaking about the event, Jeff Connolly, Chairman and CEO of Siemens Australia said that, “There is a real business appetite for information, best practice sharing and knowledge about digitalisation in Australia. And this is important because through digitalisation, Australia can be a major player in global value chains and also in innovation.”
CEOs and thought leaders from Siemens, AustCyber, Engineers Australia and Champion Data, to name a few, spoke about the future of manufacturing in a digitalised world and the big data landscape.
One of the event’s key note speakers was AEMO’s very own CEO Audrey Zibelman. Ms. Zibelman underlined how more intelligence was required in the domestic energy system, meaning more digitisation, in order to deliver affordability and optimisation to Australian businesses and consumers. She spoke about the critical nature of applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to forecasting and system management processes and identified new service models that would likely impact the energy market, along with system challenges and opportunities (including proliferation of Virtual Power Plants and the Internet of Things) that digitalisation would bring.
Ms. Zibelman also reinforced the industry recommendations laid out in AEMO’s Integrated Systems Plan (ISP) published on July 17, 2018.
AEMO would like to thank Siemens for the opportunity to be a part of such a constructive event, and we commit to sharing more important takeaways from similar events.