AMPEAK Special: Technology is the Enabler

Hello and welcome to Transforming Asset Management in our regular video series where we discuss key asset management topics and share tips drawn from our collective experience in industry. My name's Rory Gibbons, and today I've got David Horstman with me again. And I've just got back from AM Peak on the Gold Coast, and what a wonderful conference it was. So I just wanted to say a big thanks to everyone at AM Council for putting on such a wonderful event that that, helped foster community of practice, knowledge sharing, and really innovation we can take back to our businesses. And a lot of the conference themes were centered around that innovation and that new technologies that's sweeping through society, like our gen a gen AI technology, our digital transformations through our businesses. And there's definitely some very exciting content and some things I plan to action in my own practices to improve business efficiency. But I think, where I really enjoyed the conference was those presentations that were focused on the AM fundamentals. And, AM fundamentals that would really drive change within those organizations. And I think what we wanted to do today here, Dave, is acknowledge that technology is an enabler, but where organizations will really see that change and turn the dial is when they've got good robust traditional AM practices that are well aligned with their business objectives and then layering in the powerful technologies where they're really gonna see that change. So I wanna get your your thoughts on that. Yeah. No. Great. Great point, mate. And I think that is probably the most fundamental aspect of new technology and, you know, this is it's not even new to now. Right? Like, as technological advancements have occurred and continue to occur ever increasing rates, the reality is what matters is how we turn that to our actual practices, particularly within the AM space. So I think, you know, for me, one of the most obvious areas of application, or in fact if we think about it as an end to end process, probably three key areas in fact. We all know that assets exist to provide a service, topic that we've talked about before. So really, how do we best utilize that new technology to help us better understand our service levels first and foremost, even potentially how our service users or those key stakeholders, how are they being impacted, how do they use the service. And then fundamentally to make sure that you're then providing that service in the most effective way across your portfolio, it's really then about stakeholder engagement as well. And I have no doubt that the emerging technologies you were talking about are going to make that easier and more effective. I mean we've seen that with digital transformation, right? Like the ability to provide quick and easy and interactive digital information to service users is really key to some of our engagement and decision making processes. And look, the final area where I think we're going to see some significant improvements as well, and I challenge us to look at ways we can apply those new technologies, is in our scenario analysis. Like, we know that fundamental to making good optimized investment decisions is being able to see different versions of the future. And really that scenario based analysis is an obvious area where these new emerging technologies will just make that more effective, more efficient, just be more capable overall. So really exciting time, I think, as an asset management practitioner, but it's really about applying those technologies to those fundamentals as used by rightly, Claudia. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where you'll drive that change. So, yeah, thanks for stopping by and discussing, David. Pleasure. And and thanks again AM Council for hosting such a wonderful event. And we hope to see you back here on Transforming AM coming next episode is coming soon. See