Petah Marian | KPMG Futurist
As director of foresight and communications at KPMG Futures, Petah works to uncover opportunities around future technologies and business models to drive the firm’s long-term strategy.
This year’s SXSW Sydney looked into the future of technology, with global speakers coming together to talk about how we harness narratives about the future, what work might look like as AI becomes more sophisticated and the kinds of cultures that will need to emerge in order to support innovation.
1. Take control
There is a need for organisations and individuals to take control of the stories that we tell about the future to help actively create more positive futures.
This was a theme that was discussed by futurist Brian David Johnson, Manohar Paluri, VP of AI at Meta, and by a panel that explored the gap between science fiction and actual science.
By reframing the stories we tell about the future, it puts humans back in the driving seat, and more able to choose the kinds of roles we want AI to play in our lives, rather than taking a science-fiction style perspective where AI takes away our agency.
Johnson emphasised the things that make a good story – tension, drama, potential apocalypse, don’t necessarily make for good futures. “Something has to be bad to be interesting,” he said.
But, he emphasised, to get out of thinking about AI as a threat, is to think about it as a tool that is being used by humans to create specific outcomes.
If AI is embedded in everything that we do today, and it becomes woven into how we work and live, how do we rethink what we value? What kinds of jobs to we care about?
2. Pace of change
One of the clearest examples of where AI is accelerating the pace of change is in drug discovery. AI tools like Google’s AlphaFold 3 are now able to predict the structure of proteins and how they interact.
In a session on The Genomic Transformation of Medicine, Professor Daniel MacArthur explained how the pace of genomic drug development has meant that even within sibling groups doctors have been able change how genetic issues can be treated.
In one family where all three siblings have Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), the oldest was born before an effective treatment was developed, has had his life extended with medical intervention, but is unable to lift, eat or breathe by himself. His younger brother, who was diagnosed in utero, was able to receive a treatment within a couple of weeks of birth, has a very different disease course and can walk with a frame. The family’s youngest child was able to receive a third type of treatment, a gene therapy, and because of that treatment, is a perfectly healthy child.
MacArthur is leading an initiative to diversify the genetic data it has access to through the Centre for Population Genomics. This is to ensure that innovation in the space is inclusive and allows all Australians to experience the benefits of developments in this space.
3. Future-proofing data
How data is managed and used was another theme that emerged, particularly as devices access more personal information about us. In a session that explored the implications of neurotechnology and what it means for humans, speakers explored how data that might not mean much today, may be able to be decoded and used in the future.
Already there are a lot that wearables like watches and other health-based devices can tell people about their health, but there are concerns that data being collected by them, that today is innocuous, could be used to do things like create higher medical insurance premiums for people with certain pre-conditions.
This is applicable in areas outside of neurotechnology and health, with apps that collect other personal information such as location and spending data likely to reveal increased insights in coming years. As AI tools learn to mine information more deeply, organisations will need to find a balance between maintaining trust by collecting only the ‘necessary’ amount of information versus collecting more information for the deeper insights that may emerge.
4. Recalibrating work
The ability to achieve a better work-life balance was one theme that emerged in the conversation around developments in AI.
In a session hosted by KPMG, Myfanwy Wallwork, HTI AI Governance Lead at the University of Technology Sydney, described how there is likely to be an opportunity to see enhanced work life balance because of increased use of AI tools, although there may be tension as customers seek out discounts off the back of these efficiency gains.
Daniel Palmer, co-founder of Sydney-based Relevance AI, explored how AI agents could move society closer to a shorter working week. He highlighted the growing use of multi-agent systems, powered by large language models, that manage dynamic, generative tasks. With 63% of businesses promoting a four-day week reporting improved talent attraction and retention, and 78% of employees feeling happier and less stressed, Palmer suggested that AI agents could help more businesses adopt a standard four-day workweek.
Armand Ruiz, Director of AI Engineering at IBM, discussed the rise of AI agents as digital coworkers. He compared AI's evolution from predictive models to autonomous task execution to the Industrial Revolution, emphasising its potential to reshape industries. Ruiz argued that AI agents should be viewed not just as software but as employees, requiring onboarding, access to tools, and role-specific content. At IBM, where thousands of error-filled reports are submitted daily, developers typically assess and fix code manually. An AI agent, however, can understand the code, spot errors, and recommend solutions, potentially saving millions of hours in productivity at scale.
As organisations look to roll out AI tools at scale, making sure it is a win-win-win for companies, clients and employees will be important to maximising the productivity gains for everyone. As AI agents mature, there is the potential that startups and smaller businesses will have the potential to scale, providing them with greater capacity to disrupt the market, reshaping market dynamics and consumer expectations.
5. Creating the conditions for success
As the workforce is getting more diverse with multiple generations in the workplace, alongside changing expectations and values means that organisations need to find ways to connect across different viewpoints and create a common sense of purpose. In the 2025 Skills Horizon report by UTS associate professor Sandra Peters and UTS professor Kai Renner, they said that one of the key skills would be the ability to create common ground. How can we use difference productively while finding and amplifying commonalities, they asked.
Finding common ground doesn’t have to mean avoiding conflict, however. Harvard Business Review contributing editor Amy Gallo described how healthy conflict allows people to produce good work, and that we need to counter our inclination to be likeable to focus on creating an environment of mutual respect to get the best out of people.
Successful organisations will need to ensure that they are creating the best conditions for innovation, creating enough common ground to generate psychological safety, which allows people to disagree productively
