AI Engineer Melbourne 2026 — Leadership (Day 1 Midday)

Responsible AI isn’t culturally neutral. American AI development embeds distinctly American values — individual liberty, technological solutionism, and winner-takes-all competition. But what happens when these values clash with Australian cultural principles that prioritise collective welfare, egalitarianism, and the “fair go”?

Current AI governance frameworks — largely imported from Silicon Valley — often perpetuate values misaligned with Australian regulatory expectations and social norms. The Mathpath and recovering American Aubrey Blanche draws on principles of mateship, pragmatic skepticism, and community-oriented thinking, in this presentation that introduces a distinctly Australian responsibility framework for AI implementation. Rather than treating AI risks as individual consumer choices or market failures, this framework positions AI governance as a collective responsibility — where technology serves the common good, ensures equitable access, and earns trust through demonstrated fairness rather than assumed benevolence.

As AI moves from "chat" to "act," the risk surface is exploding. Traditional governance is too slow, too onerous, and often looks in the wrong places. Join this session to learn how to:

- Identify the 3 fatal flaws of applying legacy governance to autonomous agents. - Implement the GRASP Framework: A 5-part approach (Governance, Reach, Agency, Safeguards, Potential Impact) to categorizing agentic risk. - Leverage Observability as Governance: How real-time visibility replaces manual approvals to keep innovators moving without breaking the enterprise.

Everyone wants privacy, but the best models require you to give up control of your data. What options are there for keeping data private but while still embracing the promise of AI?

In this talk we'll take a practical, experience based look at options ranging from private models, trusted execution environments, differential privacy, multi-part computation, federated learning and homomorphic encryption (and yes I'll explain what these are!)

I'll explain what each is, when they are useful and give my personal experience with running some of these in production (the ones that made it that far!) over the past 4 years.

A moderated conversation closing the Governance & Ethics session. Andrew Murphy leads a discussion with Aubrey Blanche, Hamish Songsmith, and Nick Lothian on how principles, operational frameworks, and hands-on privacy implementation come together in practice.