AI Engineer Melbourne 2026 — Leadership (Day 2 Afternoon)

Everyone talks about AI transformation. Almost no one talks about what happens when you survey your workforce and discover that executives and employees have completely different ideas about what AI readiness means - or when your pilot succeeds technically but stumbles in implementation.

This talk walks through a real organisational AI adoption journey end to end: designing and running an employee AI-readiness survey to surface use cases, identify champions and resistance; assessing infrastructure readiness against ambition; mapping the gap between executive strategy and frontline reality; and building an implementation roadmap grounded in what the organisation could actually absorb - not just what looked good on a slide.

We'll cover how use cases were prioritised against both business objectives and genuine readiness, how a pilot was developed and what it took to move it into production, and, critically, where things went wrong along the way. The failures weren't in the AI solution itself but in the human and organisational layers around it, which is exactly where most enterprise AI initiatives quietly die. Whether you're beginning your AI adoption journey or leading initiatives beyond the proof-of-concept stage, this talk is a field report from the other side - showing what worked, what didn't, and how to catch the gaps before they scale.

Most AI transformation stories focus on tooling, targets, and adoption curves. At Culture Amp, our primary focus was people and culture. We still wanted to drive and accelerate our impact, but we weren’t willing to compromise on our focus on people to get there. We then partnered with an engineering analytics firm to measure whether our approach actually made a difference.

This is a co-presentation from Culture Amp's Director of Developer Experience and Director of Engineering Enablement. Having both roles in an org our size is an unusual choice, and it signals how seriously we take people and culture alongside technical delivery. Together, we helped lead an AI rollout grounded in trust over mandates, enablement over directives, and learning loops over training checklists.

We'll walk through what we built: a rollout shaped by pioneers and champions, rituals designed around psychological safety, hack days and storytelling that made experimentation feel normal. We'll share the data from a six-month research program across 88 engineers, tracking DORA metrics, adoption telemetry, and developer sentiment against industry benchmarks.

PR sizes stayed flat while merge frequency climbed, which runs counter to the industry trend of AI-inflated code volume. Code review engagement went up, not down. 39% of engineers reported faster delivery. But we'll also be honest about what didn't work: MTTR increased post-rollout, decentralised messaging created confusion, and out-of-hours commits rose. Even with our people focus, we were moving faster than was comfortable for everyone, and we had to own that tension.

We're not presenting a blueprint. We're sharing what happened when we tried to go as fast as we could without losing sight of the people doing the work. If you've been wondering whether investing in engineering culture pays off during an AI transformation, we think you'll find this useful.

AI tools are an amplifier. They don't just amplify productivity, they amplify whatever dynamics already exist in a team.

Steve Yegge calls it the Dracula Effect: AI coding at full speed is vampiric, draining engineers faster than anyone expected.

We've got to defend our teams against burnout and help them amplify the dynamics that nudge towards flourishing. In this talk, I'll present a practical framework and patterns for doing exactly that — drawn from peer-reviewed research and real experience leading a team shipping with AI tools.

A moderated conversation closing the L4 Culture & People session — and closing the Leadership track. Andrew Murphy leads a discussion with Dr Christian Dandre, Eric Grigson and Paul Hughes (Culture Amp), and Navin Keswani on readiness, adoption, and keeping people healthy through the change.