Speakers & Sessions

Day Two: Tuesday 14 November
11.00 am-12.00 pm

EY Space Tech

Emma James and Anthony Jones

Emma James

Emma is a Director in EY’s Space Tech team in Sydney and leads the Product capability in Oceania Assurance. She is an experienced leader who specializes in driving the vision and SaaS product roadmaps for businesses, focusing on the collaboration between customer (CX) and business strategy.

Emma’s recent qualifications include a Master of Business Administration from RMIT University specializing in Digital Entrepreneurship. Emma’s skills combine technical understanding with human centered design to create desirable, viable and feasible products. Prior to joining EY in 2019, Emma spent 17 years at Qantas where she led Customer and Marketing Technology, embedding the CX Strategy into the business and transforming how both customers and employees of Qantas interact through digital and AI products.

Currently, Emma leads the development of EY’s Space Technology product suite and platform, harnessing the power of Space Technology without the need to be a rocket scientist.

In 2023, Emma was a finalist to the Australian Female Space Leader of the Year by the Australian Space Awards.

Anthony Jones

Anthony has worked in professional service firms since 1993 and has been a partner since January 2005.

Anthony is currently leading the development of EY’s strategy and business capabilities across the domain of space and space technology. From upstream, midstream and downstream perspectives EY has strong capability to deliver both traditional and new services. Anthony is closely aligned with the Australian Space Agency through SmartSat CRC, Geosciences Australia, Microsoft AI for Earth, NASA and Swinburne University. Anthony works closely with our clients, industry partners and EY teams to deliver new and innovative solutions to our clients that are helping build community resilience, manage our planets health and improve the productivity and efficiency of our clients.

As Oceania Assurance Innovation Leader for EY Anthony has played a key role in developing EY’s thinking around the future of digital, including the development of EY’s go to market capability around “digital trust”, managing digital transformation and the implications of technology change on business and the broader audit profession. This role requires Anthony to evaluate and understand the impact of new technologies on business (e.g. robotics, AI, blockchain), develop new EY market offerings around emerging technology and assess implications for Boards and executive management.

Session Topic

How Can the Vantage of Space Give you Strategic Advantage on Earth?

Explore how satellite imagery and AI can solve long-standing problems in new and innovative ways and help organisations better prevent and manage risk across their business.

Space Tech is driving one of the biggest transformations of our generation and will improve life on Earth using tools that combine high-resolution satellite imagery data with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Whether it’s a precious natural habitat or the built environment, patterns of human behaviour or flaws in critical infrastructure, all can be surveyed and better understood from Space. This is the knowledge hub to explore the fast-growing applications of Space Tech. The better we can understand our world, the safer, more sustainable and more predictable we will make it.

Space Tech is the gigantic leap that enables us to monitor activities and assets across vast distances and into the most remote realms of the planet. It removes humans from danger zones and puts them in the driver’s seat, accelerating innovation with data-rich tools and navigating new domains. Space Tech will enable us to target costly and labour-intensive inspections to where they are most needed, making them more efficient as it alerts them to issues, rather than endless cycles of just-in-case inspections, identify anomalies and changes in patterns both at a point in time and over time. Virtual site inspections via satellites – which can produce images down to a geospatial resolution of between 30 and 50 centimetres – will cover vast differences on a consistent loop. This frequent inspection cycle can observe what humans could never previously see, at a level of detail we could not have imagined, such as water ingress threatening rail infrastructure that may not be present when humans drive by, methane and gas emissions from pipeline networks and the health of native forests and wetlands.

Here are just a few ways Space Tech can solve old problems in new ways and drive better decisions on Earth.

Flag a leaking water pipe in critical urban infrastructure
Keep watch over fuel-loads in bushland to assess bushfire risks
Validate insurance claims remotely
Monitor revegetation commitments
Alert an energy company of erosion threatening a transmission tower
Monitor carbon stockpiles and predict vegetation growth and species health

The fast-growing Space Tech team is building software solutions to apply this powerful technology and constantly uncovering new use cases.

Are you ready to re-imagine your world on Earth and start your Space Tech journey?

Learn about this incredible EY Space Tech hub investment in conjunction with Swinburne University of Technology.

Download Presentation

Theme: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

The “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” theme for the IIA NZ Conference 2023 challenges internal auditors to reflect on their past successes while embracing the need for innovation and adaptation in an everchanging business landscape. The conference theme serves as a powerful reminder that traditional methods and strategies that have led to success in the past may no longer be sufficient to navigate the complexities of the present and the future.

During this thought-provoking conference, attendees will explore how the role of internal auditors has evolved over time and how they must evolve with it. Speakers will share inspiring stories of organisations and professionals who have recognised the importance of continuous improvement and embraced transformative approaches to internal audit processes.

Participants will gain valuable insights into emerging trends and technologies shaping the internal audit profession. Workshops and interactive sessions will encourage attendees to challenge the status quo, identify opportunities for growth, and enhance their internal audit practices to drive maximum value for their organisations.

The “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” IIA NZ Conference 2023 theme is a call to action, urging internal auditors to be proactive change agents. By embracing innovation, adopting new methodologies, and enhancing their skillsets, internal auditors will be better equipped to lead their organisations through uncertainty and towards sustainable success.