How A/NZ technology leaders use ADAPT to make better decisions, justify investment, develop their teams, and lead transformation with confidence.
Choose a client story from the left panel. Use the topic filter to find stories relevant to your prospect’s specific challenge.
RSPCA’s Head of IT & Finance was running a lean technology team with limited AI capability. The organisation was competing for donor dollars during a cost-of-living crisis, and leadership wanted to understand how AI could modernise operations and strengthen their market position — but no one in the team had done this before.
They had two Gartner licences costing approximately $120–130K per year. The analysts were capable, but too academic for an Australian NFP context. When Gartner offered to reduce to one seat at around $60–70K, RSPCA took the opportunity to evaluate whether something better existed.
The Head of IT attended ADAPT’s CIO Network Effect event and signed up within days. Two things made the difference:
RSPCA’s investment was slightly higher than Gartner’s reduced offer. The reason they proceeded: “You’re local and you can enable multiple members of my team — I like your model.” ADAPT also helped build the internal business case for the COO who signed off.
TAL’s CIO was midway through a major cloud transformation — 100% to the cloud, including a significant Microsoft deal. He had a strong sense of where the organisation stood, but it was all instinct. When the board asked “How do we compare to our peers? How do you know this was the right decision?” he had no local data to point to.
He described it clearly: “I’ve got a good idea of where we sit — but it’s all in my head, kind of sentiment. I don’t have any data to back it up, and no local data anyway.”
Global Gartner benchmarks didn’t reflect Australian market conditions, and using them in board conversations was unconvincing.
The turning point was attending ADAPT events and seeing benchmark data presented live. His instinct: “Where do we sit compared to what’s on that screen right now?”
The Head of Technology at a national law firm had led 12 months of genuine transformation — improving data maturity, modernising infrastructure, building AI readiness. The work was real. But it was invisible to non-technical leaders.
Three challenges converged at once:
Fire and Rescue NSW’s Acting Director of IT was asked to build a technology strategy for the organisation. His brief to himself was clear: something genuinely modern and forward-thinking, not limited by legacy government assumptions.
Two things made this hard:
The key was advisor match. A senior strategist from a big consulting firm would have been the wrong fit: theoretically capable, but without lived experience of building and executing in regulated, resource-constrained environments.
ADAPT matched him with Dylan Naidoo — an advisor whose background was specifically in regulated sectors where doing more with less is a daily reality, not a constraint to work around theoretically.
Mission Australia holds highly sensitive data, including the locations of women in domestic violence shelters. A security breach wouldn’t just be a data incident; it could put vulnerable people at direct risk. The board identified the organisation’s NIST risk score as too high and demanded a reduction in risk exposure.
The CIO had developed a two-year program to move from high risk to medium risk. But Gartner’s global benchmarks showed Mission Australia was already overspending on IT and security — creating a direct contradiction in the boardroom: why invest more when you’re apparently already spending too much?
He needed local data that reflected his actual peer group, not global averages built from organisations with entirely different risk profiles.
The CIO regularly brings questions to ADAPT that Gartner cannot answer: “I’ve asked Gartner if they can help me with this. They can’t. Can you help?”
Gold Coast Health is one of Australia’s most advanced digital hospital organisations. The Executive Director’s brief to ADAPT was simple and revealing: “The best way you can support me is to support my team.”
Five senior leaders each had genuinely different challenges:
Gold Coast Health had been using Gartner. The Executive Director’s reason for switching was direct:
ADAPT’s approach — finding the closest relevant experience and adapting it to the specific context — was the only model capable of addressing five completely different problems simultaneously.
Fletcher Building was rolling out a major decentralisation and needed a new technology strategy to support it. The CIO had developed the strategy and it was board-ready — but they wanted an independent review first. Two specific needs:
Sheridan Ware, former CIO of Charter Hall, was the match that made this engagement work. Her building and property sector context meant the review wasn’t generic IT advice — it was grounded in the realities of large Australian construction businesses. ADAPT’s ability to match the specific advisor to the specific context, rather than sending whoever was available, was the reason this worked.
Air Services Australia manages Australian airspace — there is no other organisation that does what they do. At the time of engagement, they were managing several simultaneous high-stakes situations:
One stakeholder had also had a deeply negative prior experience with ADAPT and had refused to engage. The relationship needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
ADAPT’s approach for unprecedented problems: find the closest relevant experience and adapt it to the context. The One Sky Program had never been attempted — but Sheridan Ware had managed a merger from 15,000 to 40,000 employees overnight. Different context, identical pressures.
Nestlé’s technology team was rolling out Microsoft Copilot across the organisation. The problem had two distinct parts:
The reverse mentoring program — pairing junior digital-savvy staff with senior leaders — also needed a proper launch. Without a shared baseline of AI understanding, neither group would get the most from it.
The engagement required practical on-site delivery. ADAPT provided both components.