There is a moment in every founder's life when the noise stops and the signal gets through.
For me, that moment came at 1:47pm on a Thursday afternoon, nine floors above Maroochydore, surrounded by people I had never met three days earlier, listening to a man named Craig Scroggie explain how he borrowed another eight billion dollars, in a single week, to build the digital backbone of a country that still argues about whether data centres should exist.
I thought: this is either the most insane thing I have ever heard, or it is the most rational. It took me about four seconds to realise it was both.
Welcome to FWD>>>FEST 26.
The Festival That Should Not Exist
Let me be precise about what Forward Fest is, because precision matters and the world has too many vaguely described "innovation events" that deliver nothing but lanyard rash and lukewarm coffee.
FWD>>>FEST is a 2.5-day entrepreneurial and innovation festival held on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. Now in its fifth year, it is produced by Silicon Coast, a not-for-profit entity run by three board members, Kathryn Giudes, Rob Steffler, and Bryton Wishart, who, by any rational analysis, should not be able to pull this off. They have no massive corporate budget. No government department running the show. No army of staff. Min Swan, the event manager, holds the entire operation together through sheer will and a level of organisational precision that would make a Starfleet logistics officer weep with admiration.
What they have is something far more dangerous: conviction.
This year, 75% of registrants were attending for the first time. Local engagement jumped to 80%. Ticket revenue hit its highest point ever. More lean-in tickets, the "I'm coming to everything" commitment, were sold than in any previous year. Fifty-five speakers delivered across two packed days. Every single one donated their time.
If you are waiting for the part where I tell you what went wrong, you will be waiting a long time. The story of Forward Fest 26 is the story of what happens when a community decides that the future is not something you wait for, it is something you build. With your hands. With your neighbours. With whatever you have.
Day Zero: The Welcome at Mooloolaba
The festival opened on a Tuesday evening at the Mooloolaba Surf Club. Not a convention centre. Not a sterile hotel ballroom. A surf club, overlooking the Pacific, with Radium Capital picking up the bar tab and the Mooloolaba Chamber of Commerce opening its doors to people who, by and large, did not know each other yet.
Min scrapped the VIP dinners this year. Everyone gets to go where they want. Choose your own adventure. No hierarchies. No velvet ropes. Just humans meeting humans.
Kat Giudes, Chair of Silicon Coast, took the stage and set the tone with some numbers that mattered. The average cost of a cyber attack through shadow AI or prompt injection now sits at $670,000 USD, nearly double a standard breach. And this in a room full of small business owners still figuring out whether to trust their email filters.
Taschi Maxwell from the Mooloolaba Chamber reminded us that the chambers on this coast, Mooloolaba, Kawana, Maroochydore, are not competitors. They are collaborators. All three co-hosted sessions across the festival. When was the last time you saw three chambers of commerce in one region share a stage without a turf war?
What caught my attention that evening were not the speeches. It was what people were saying between the canapes. A medical imaging specialist talking about diagnostic AI but worrying about liability. A designer asking if AI could help him quote jobs faster. A council worker wondering if anyone was actually using this stuff in regional Australia. Every single conversation ended the same way: "I know I should be doing something. I just don't know what."
I hear that sentence more than any other in my work. It is the most honest thing a business owner can say about AI in 2026. And it is exactly where the real conversation begins.
The Keynote That Changed the Room: Luke Anear and SafetyCulture
Wednesday morning. 7:30am. The Wharf Events, Mooloolaba. Nearly 180 people in the room. At 7:30am. On a Wednesday.
That is not polite attendance. That is momentum.
Mayor Rosanna Natoli delivered the official welcome. Kawana Chamber's Cassy Small set the tone. And then Kathryn Giudes sat down with Luke Anear, founder of SafetyCulture, for a fireside chat that was supposed to be about leadership through disruption.
It became about something much more raw.
Luke Anear built a multi-billion dollar technology company from regional Queensland. That alone is a story worth telling. But what landed with the room was his candour about AI. He spoke about spending three days crafting a single prompt. Three days. For one instruction to an AI system.
You could feel the room recalibrate.
Half the people in that breakfast were still figuring out how to spell "ChatGPT." The other half were pretending they had been using it for years. And here was the founder of a company operating in 85 countries, telling a room full of entrepreneurs that the future was not about speed, but about the quality of the questions you ask.
As someone who builds AI solutions for a living, I can tell you: Luke Anear was right. And most of the AI industry does not want you to hear that message, because selling you a quick fix is more profitable than teaching you to think.
This is something I see every day in my own work. We deploy AI voice agents for businesses across Australia, from the Kawana Chamber of Commerce to mortgage brokers to a Victorian charity handling 150 inquiries a week. The agent is never the hard part. The hard part is exactly what Luke described: knowing what question to ask, what outcome you actually need, what your customer really wants when they pick up the phone at 9pm on a Tuesday. Get the question right, and the technology is almost trivial. Get it wrong, and no amount of computing power will save you.
Luke also spotlighted SafetySight, a student-led startup tackling first aid compliance for SMEs, who pitched live to the room. Youth in the ecosystem, not on the sidelines. The Sunshine Coast is not just talking about the next generation. It is putting them on stage.
The Human Stories: The Blood, Sweat and Tears of Overnight Success
If you think Forward Fest is a tech conference, you have fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.
The Accelerate stream session "The Blood, Sweat and Tears of Overnight Success," moderated by Susan Toft from The Laundry Lady, featured four founders at different stages of their journey, and none of them led with technology.
Ashton Wood from DV Safe Phone walked the room through what it means to build a technology solution for domestic violence survivors. He started DV Safe Phone out of his spare room during COVID. His first invoice was for $58. He now distributes phones through 580 police stations, safe houses, and hospitals across Australia. During the session, he shared that Salesforce had built him a full agentic AI platform worth $800,000, at no cost, to help survivors get to safety in the right order and the right way. An AI agent, doing life-saving work.
If anyone in that room needed a reminder that AI is not about productivity dashboards and automated email responses, Ashton provided it. The technology serves the mission. Not the other way around.
Jenna Sanders from Kenilworth Bakery spoke about taking over a 97-year-old hinterland bakery in a town of 600 people that was making four doughnuts a day, and scaling it into a business that now delivers as far as Brisbane. Chris Kerrisk from Cerge brought 25 years in tech, media, and startups, including co-founding a global ad tech company, and spoke about what it looks like to build something, watch it buckle, and start smarter again. Tony Kelly, whose Tony Kelly Restaurant Group runs 10 venues across the Sunshine Coast including Rice Boi and Spero right here at The Wharf, spoke about the reality of building a hospitality empire in a regional market, one venue at a time.
Every single story came back to the same truth: the businesses that survive are the ones that solve a human problem first and figure out the technology second.
AI Everywhere: The Thread That Ran Through Everything
Here is what I did not expect.
AI was not confined to the tech sessions. It surfaced in the sales panel. In the people and culture discussion. In the compliance conversation. In the startup pitches. In the conversations between sessions. Even sessions that were explicitly about non-AI topics, sales strategy, customer-centric culture, marketing, had an AI component emerge naturally from the discussion.
This is not like the sustainability wave from a few years ago, where you could add a page to your annual report and move on. Sustainability did not affect your operability. AI does. It affects your operations, your capability, your competitive position. Ignore it and you don't just miss an opportunity, you lose ground. The conversations at Forward Fest made that crystal clear, not through hype, but through the honest admissions of business owners working through the implications in real time.
The Trust Architecture: When Compliance Meets Capability
The afternoon session that landed hardest on Day 1 was "Accelerating Your Business with Trust." Natalle Sutton, Head of Technologies and Strategy Projects Lead at Matthew Flinders, kicked off with a keynote about AI-driven operations and the compliance cliff. Then came the panel: Nikki Fogden-Moore moderating, with Aaron Zamykal from Actualisation.ai, Daniel McKinnon as a Fractional CTO, Bryton Wishart from Cured Compliance, and Carlos Velasquez from SoundX.
The through-line was not "AI is coming." It was "AI is here, and the regulatory framework has not caught up, and the gap between those two facts is where businesses will either thrive or get buried."
This is not theoretical for me. For our clients in regulated industries, this is a Monday morning problem. The agentic AI systems we build at AI Compass don't just automate tasks, they log actions, they create audit trails, they integrate with the compliance frameworks the business already runs. Because the fastest way to destroy trust is to deploy technology that creates compliance gaps instead of closing them.
Bryton Wishart put it precisely: the businesses that treat AI governance as an afterthought will find that the afterthought becomes the headline. And not the kind of headline you want.
"I Will Survive!" - Rob Neely and the Art of Not Quitting
Lunch keynote. Rob Neely. The title alone tells you something.
Rob spoke about the reality of entrepreneurial survival in terms that nobody in a comfortable corporate job wants to hear. No glamour. No highlight reel. Just the daily decision to keep going when the numbers say stop, when the market says no, when the voices in your head say maybe this was all a terrible idea.
The room responded to Rob differently than to any other speaker. Not with admiration, but with recognition. Half the people in that room had been through some version of what he described. The other half will be.
Ten Startups, One Room, No Safety Net
The LEAP FWD Startup Pitch closed Day 1. Ten startups pitched live. Not to judges behind a table. To us. The audience voted.
This is how you build an ecosystem. Not by creating gatekeepers, but by putting skin in the game. When a founder stands in front of 200 people and asks them to believe in an idea, and those people get to vote with their hands, something honest happens. The feedback is immediate, unfiltered, and more valuable than any accelerator programme can provide.
Day Two: Nine Floors Above the Future
Thursday. Altitude Nine, Level 9, City Hall, Maroochydore. The venue change was intentional. Day 1 at The Wharf was about community. Day 2 at Altitude Nine was about scale.
The day opened with an interesting moment. Rob Steffler, one of the three Silicon Coast board members who built this festival, stood up and told the room he had caught up on sessions he missed by reading attendees' LinkedIn posts that morning. It was a small comment, but it landed with me. In 2026, events don't end at the venue door. The real-time documentation, the posts, the reflections, the conversations that happen on social media between sessions, those have become part of the event itself. The speakers reach one room. The documentation reaches the network.
The morning continued with Ethann Castell from the Atlassian Community presenting "Agile in Action," fresh from Team 26 in Anaheim. The key message: AI engines are only as good as the context you feed them. A chatbot that does not know your corporate history, your project details, your team dynamics, is just a chatbot. Context is the fuel. The AI is just the engine.
I hear this from clients constantly. "We tried ChatGPT but it didn't understand our business." Of course it didn't. You gave it an engine without fuel. This is exactly why AI Compass exists: not to sell you an AI tool, but to build the context layer that makes AI useful for your specific business, your specific processes, your specific customers.
Rebecca Masci from Brisbane 2032 spoke about what the Olympic and Paralympic Games mean for the Sunshine Coast. The Queensland Government procures $35 billion a year in products and services. The Olympics will add another $2.5 billion on top. Her message was clear: do not wait until next year. Get involved now.
Craig Scroggie: The Man Who Borrowed Eight Billion Dollars
The headline session of the festival. The Sunshine Coast Tech Industry Alliance Thought Leaders Forum.
Jason Garland, Chair of SCTechIA, took the mic to open the session, welcomed the room, and introduced Craig Scroggie, CEO and Managing Director of NEXTDC.
The panel included Kat Giudes facilitating, Amanda Yeates from ARUP, Kris Carver from ENTAG, and Jason himself. But make no mistake, this session belonged to Craig.
Craig dropped numbers that redefined the room's understanding of scale. NEXTDC had just borrowed $8 billion in a single week. It might last 12 months. The Sunshine Coast data centre, currently under construction, is being upgraded from a quarter-billion to a half-billion dollar investment. He runs 40 AI agents inside NEXTDC right now. Not pilots. Not experiments. Production agents running business processes.
And then he said something that changed how I think about what we are building here. When the data centre is live, the Sunshine Coast will have the infrastructure to compete with any metropolitan region in Australia for AI workloads. The submarine cables are being laid. The power is being connected. The physical backbone of the digital economy is being built, literally, within view of the windows of the room we were sitting in.
Craig was under serious time pressure that day, with commitments pulling him to Brisbane. After the panel, he barely had time for conversations before leaving. I was fortunate to get one of them. I continued a conversation with Craig that started months earlier at a NEXTDC partners meeting at their Brisbane headquarters: what happens when token subsidisation ends?
His answer was immediate: Jevons paradox. The more infrastructure deployed, the cheaper the tokens become. Same pattern as SaaS, he said. Companies subsidised subscription pricing to drive adoption. The AI providers are doing the same.
I hope he is right. But as someone who builds AI systems for businesses that need them to work regardless of pricing shifts, I think the prudent approach is to build for both scenarios. If token costs drop, great. If they normalise upward, your business should not be hostage to a pricing model you don't control. That is why AI Compass builds systems that can run on local infrastructure when the use case demands it. When a client needs sensitive transcription or document processing, we deploy locally-run language models that never send data offshore. Not because the cloud is bad, but because optionality is good, and because data sovereignty is not a checkbox, it is an architecture decision.
Craig is building the pipes at national scale. At AI Compass, we build what flows through them at business scale.
Peter Deans: A Voice for the Region
Peter Deans took the afternoon session with a regional advocacy workshop that turned a room full of entrepreneurs into a working group. This was not a presentation. It was participation.
He took the six identified focus areas from FWD>>>FEST 25 and asked the room to choose one and build a working case for advocacy. Together. In real time.
I have attended many sessions where people talk about regional development. This was the first one where I watched it happen.
Daniel Flynn: The Story You Tell Yourself
The closing keynote was Daniel Flynn, founder of Thankyou.
I expected a story about building a social enterprise. I got something else entirely.
Daniel spoke about the most important story you will ever tell, and it is not your pitch deck, your brand narrative, or your social media content. It is the story you tell yourself on the inside. The one that plays on repeat when the business is failing, when the numbers don't work, when the world tells you that your idea is not enough.
He said a story is a Trojan horse. It carries truth into places that statistics cannot reach. And that the greatest danger for any founder is not failure, but the internal narrative that makes you stop trying.
Nobody moved.
In a festival full of numbers, infrastructure, AI agents, compliance frameworks, pitch decks, and billion-dollar data centres, the closing keynote was about the human heart. And it was the right call.
The Gala: Where Stories Become Legend
Thursday evening. The Celebration Gala. Min Swan was running the evening with her usual combination of military precision and genuine warmth.
The Forward Fest stories that emerged at the gala were the embodiment of what this event makes possible. Shannon, who walked into FWD>>>FEST 23 with a terrible business card, no pitch deck, and an idea. Two years later, he had met the King of England.
Then came Bill Ovenden from The Lad Collective. Two brothers whose problem statement was as simple as it gets: they moved out of home, their mum had made their beds for 23 years, and they were never going to attract partners living like that. So they invented sheets with magnetic fasteners. A multi-million dollar company. A factory in Coolum. One brother about to open the American branch in Texas.
Their story carried a message that every founder in the room needed to hear: when you design for the person who struggles the most, you usually make it better for everyone. They accidentally built a product that gave independence to people with disabilities. The NDIS space opened up. What started as two blokes trying to make their beds became a lesson in what happens when you remove friction from a system.
Min Swan wrapped the evening with the announcement that Forward Fest would return in 2027.
What I Took Away: The AI Compass Perspective
I attended my second Forward Fest as the Director of AI Compass. I left more convinced than ever that the future of innovation in Australia does not have to be written in Sydney or Melbourne.
Here is what I know now that I did not know before.
Change is the only constant. I have been saying this for years, and I said it again at Forward Fest to anyone who would listen. But the second half of that sentence matters more: community is the variable that determines whether change destroys you or propels you. The Sunshine Coast is not competing with Silicon Valley. It is building something those places cannot replicate: a culture where a billionaire like Luke Anear donates his morning to speak at a breakfast, where Craig Scroggie spends his afternoon explaining data centre economics to an audience of 30 before rushing to Brisbane, and where Ashton Wood tears up talking about the next phone he will deliver to a survivor.
AI is not a strategy. It is an instrument. But an instrument without a strategy is useless. It requires skill, practice, and above all, a song worth playing. The businesses at Forward Fest that are thriving with AI are thriving because they had the strategy first, the human problem defined, the outcome clear, and then applied the technology to serve it.
Trust is infrastructure. Craig Scroggie builds physical infrastructure, data centres, submarine cables, the literal pipes through which the digital economy flows. But the trust infrastructure is what determines whether businesses will use those pipes. The compliance frameworks, the governance models, the honest conversations about what AI can and cannot do, that is the work that makes the technology useful rather than just impressive.
The question everyone asks is the question that matters most. Between sessions, in the hallways, at the bar, over coffee, the sentence I heard more than any other was: "I know I should be doing something with AI. I just don't know what." That is not a failure of knowledge. It is an invitation to have an honest conversation. And it is exactly why AI Compass exists.
At AI Compass, we build AI agents that answer phones at 2am, qualify leads before your sales team starts their morning coffee, and route complex inquiries to the right human without losing context. We deploy agentic automation that turns 15 hours of weekly admin into 15 minutes of oversight. We run locally-hosted language models for businesses that need their data to stay exactly where it is. And we do it from the Sunshine Coast, for businesses across Australia, because the expertise usually reserved for large corporates should be available to businesses that don't have a six-figure IT budget.
Our own phone number is answered by an AI agent called Future. If you are curious what that sounds like, call it: +61 (7) 4801 8012.
Riding the Wave
The theme of FWD>>>FEST 26 was "Riding the Wave." The Sunshine Coast is literally an ocean community, and surfers understand something that most business strategists do not: you cannot control the wave. You can only prepare yourself, position yourself, and commit when the moment comes.
The wave that is coming for every business in this country, on this coast, in this world, is not just AI. It is the convergence of AI, geopolitical disruption, infrastructure transformation, and a generational shift in what people expect from the organisations they work for, buy from, and trust.
Forward Fest showed me, with painful clarity and joyful evidence, that the Sunshine Coast has the raw materials for something extraordinary. The infrastructure is being built, literally, with NEXTDC's half-billion dollar investment visible from the windows of Altitude Nine. The community is engaged, 75% new attendees, 80% local, chambers of commerce collaborating across the region. The stories are being told, Daniel Flynn's Trojan horses carrying truth into places that statistics cannot reach.
FWD>>>FEST 26 did not give anyone a roadmap. Roadmaps are for tourists. What it gave was proof of concept. Proof that a region can build an ecosystem that attracts talent, capital, and ideas. Proof that entrepreneurs who refuse to quit can turn four doughnuts a day into five thousand, a spare room of phones into a national movement, a terrible business card into a meeting with the King of England.
I walked into Forward Fest 26 as a business owner looking for connections and insights.
I walked out as a believer.
Not in any ideology or methodology or platform. But in the oldest innovation engine known to humanity: people gathering in a room, telling each other the truth, and deciding together that the future is worth building.
See you at FWD>>>FEST 27. I will be the one with the AI Compass lanyard, probably talking to someone about voice agents and asking too many questions.
And if you missed Forward Fest this year, do not make the same mistake twice.
Arek Rejman is the Director and Founder of AI Compass, an AI advisory and implementation company based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. AI Compass builds voice agents, AI automation, and intelligent business systems for Australian businesses. Arek is a Founding Member of the Sunshine Coast Council AI Advisory Board, AI Strategy Consultant to the Manufacturing Excellence Forum, Technology Sponsor and Executive Board member of Kawana Chamber of Commerce, and host of The Cue Point Podcast. AI Compass is listed on the Australian Government National AI Centre Directory.
FWD>>>FEST 26 was produced by Silicon Coast (siliconcoast.org.au). For information about FWD>>>FEST 27, visit fwdfest.co.
You are welcome to share this article or any part of it. All we ask is that you link back to the original at aicompass.com.au and credit the author. Good stories travel further when the source travels with them.
#FWDFest #SiliconCoast #SunshineCoast #AICompass #AustralianAI #NEXTDC #SafetyCulture #Thankyou #Innovation