Delivering more with less: Key takeaways from CTO Day Sydney

Shrinking budgets, skills shortages and the power of AI are the top challenges keeping Australia’s CTOs up at night.

We joined industry leaders in Sydney on 20 May for Factor’s CTO Day, where we explored how to drive innovation, accelerate AI initiatives and deliver long-term business value through technology.

With energising and thought-provoking conversations throughout the day, it’s clear we’re entering a new era of tech, one where architecture, AI-enabled software delivery and aligned strategies go hand-in-hand to maximise business outcomes. Here are some of the insights we took away from the event.

Keeping pace in a continually evolving landscape

The conversations at CTO Day echoed what we’ve been hearing at other industry roundtables and events around the country and internationally: tech leaders across all industries are under pressure to deliver more value more quickly, despite fewer resources and tighter constraints. Factor’s CTO insights survey backed this up, with one in three CTOs reporting that they lack the budget to meet growing delivery expectations.

Shrinking budgets means organisations not only lack the funds to embark on long-term transformation projects, but they are also struggling to attract and retain the right talent to keep existing initiatives on track. 18% of leaders say they have a skills and talent shortage, leading to some interesting discussions about how delivery teams will change shape over the next decade.

While external partnerships once helped to bridge capability gaps, large-scale vendor relationships are becoming harder to justify. As we heard at a recent finance leaders roundtable earlier this year, many feel traditional partners are no longer offering the proactive support, flexibility or value that they need in today’s climate. Leaders are looking for partners who understand their current challenges, can provide meaningful, flexible support and are also prepared to do more with less.

In this context, it’s no surprise that organisations are turning to AI as a solution. But the mood has shifted. While AI experimentation without real outcomes passed for progress a few years ago, CTOs are now looking beyond the hype and want to see real business value.

In particular, many organisations are focusing on how AI can reduce operational costs and accelerate the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to help them gain a competitive edge.

Re-imagining the software delivery lifecycle with agentic AI

At CTO Day, we also held an exclusive roundtable with 15 technology leaders to explore how AI can transform business. As part of the session, we also shared a live demonstration of our agentic AI solution, which takes a business requirement and turns it into a dev-ready solution design in just minutes.

Our demo followed a real-world example of a business user requesting more customer insights. The AI agent first ensures that the request is well-defined, conversing with the user to gather all the necessary information required to understand the aims and requirements. Once this is completed, the agent then creates a solution design based on its knowledge of the specific services and tools in use in the business. In our example, the agent identifies the need to create a HubSpot integration and suggests an appropriate design.

This solution design can be reviewed by a solution architect, as a human-in-the-loop, or immediately progressed to the next stage, at which point a testing strategy, risk assessment, change impact, API specifications and summary are automatically generated by the AI agent.

This approach speeds up the software development lifecycle in three major ways:

1. Early clarity: It ensures the business requirement is well defined before a technology team is required.
2. Solution design acceleration: A solution architect has a solid foundational design to work from and build on rather than starting from scratch for every new requirement.
3. Faster handoff: With a lot of the preliminary work already completed by the agent, the development team is provided with a bootstrapped solution and can get started on delivery quicker.

Book a complimentary AI discovery session

Thanks to everyone who attended our roundtable event or stopped by our stand at CTO Day.

At Equal Experts, we help organisations embrace AI without falling into the traps of hype, endless proof-of-concepts, or failed implementations. Our focus is simple: faster time to value, at lower cost.

A great place to start is our complimentary 30-minute AI discovery session. We’ll help you identify some of the high-impact use cases for AI in your organisation and validate them quickly, turning potential into real action.

Book a complimentary 30-minute AI use-case validation discovery or reach out directly to me and the Equal Experts Australia team to learn more.