On Wednesday 12 August we were at the Sydney Enterprise AI and Automation Summit 2026, run by Clutch Events at Doltone House Hyde Park. We sponsored the coffee cart and kept a stack of brochures on it for anyone curious about the name on the front. Our team also ran a demo session during the day.
Doors opened at 8:30 with breakfast and barista coffee, so the cart was part of the morning before the first session started.
Who was in the room
According to Clutch Events, 265 delegates from 138 organisations attended. A few more numbers from their post-event report:
- 77% came from large enterprises
- Banking, financial services and insurance was the biggest group, at 28% of the room
- By seniority: 7% C-suite and founders, 23% VP, director or head of, 42% managers, leads and principals, and 15% engineers and practitioners
- 49 people had AI, ML or automation in their job title, and 126 (48% of the room) worked across AI, data and platform
What the agenda was about
The program spent less time on what models can do and more on running AI inside a big organisation. There was a panel on governing AI at scale without slowing delivery, and another on whether AI programs are paying off once they move past the pilot. Other sessions covered measuring business impact, staff building their own agents and automations, and AI rules across different markets.
What we took from it
That agenda lines up with what we hear from teams in general. Once a pilot works, the questions change. Who is allowed to call which model? Where does it run? What happens to the bill when usage doubles? When an auditor asks, can you show who deployed or changed what?
Those questions tend to land on managers and leads, which is most of this room, and they get sharper in regulated industries like finance.
It's also why we built Xinference the way we did. You run open models on infrastructure you control, or pay by the token through our Model API, and you call them all through one OpenAI-compatible API. There are 300+ models to pick from. Role-based access control, audit logs and OIDC single sign-on come with it, and you choose where it runs.
Where to find us next
Thanks to Clutch Events for having us, and to everyone who stopped by the cart for a coffee.
If your team is working through the same questions, book a demo and we'll show you how it works. You can also catch us in person at DevOps Summit NSW at ICC Sydney on 21 October, and at the AI Infrastructure & Enterprise Systems Summit ANZ on 26 and 27 October.