Brendan Hopper

Chairperson, Future Skills Organisation · Managing Director Innovation Ecosystems, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

As the Chairperson of the Future Skills Organisation, Brendan brings his insights across industry-led training, vocational education, and higher education to help inspire all Australians to develop the digital skills needed to fully participate in the workforce and community, and is actively advocating for free and open education that helps Australians adopt digital technologies including AI and cyber awareness.

Brendan is passionate about Australia establishing sovereign capability that grows our economy, including the specialised training, infrastructure, and mobilisation that would allow Australia to have its own technology industry, making use of the new wave of AI technology and becoming a world leader in AI powered engineering.

Brendan leads innovation ecosystems at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he is responsible for helping Australia's people and economy benefit from the AI revolution, and ensuring the bank has the right long term technology vision. Brendan led the bank's engineering transformation as CIO for Technology from 2021 to 2026, which saw the insourcing of thousands of technology roles in Australia, the establishment of merit based career pathways, and the upskilling of thousands of existing staff who were in legacy IT roles. In 2024 he created the bank's AI powered engineering function.

Brendan first studied mathematics and psychology at the University of New South Wales from 2001 to 2004, wanting to work in artificial intelligence, and dropped out because he could not afford it. He holds a Master of Information Technology (Artificial Intelligence and eCommerce) from UNSW, studied at night and completed in 2023, more than a decade after he began lecturing there in cyber security, and his first formal qualification. He publishes independent research on AI alignment and multi-agent safety, and is a Distinguished Technical Fellow at the Tech Policy Design Institute.

Prior to joining CBA in 2012, Brendan worked as a cyber security consultant, predominantly with Australia's big four banks. He spent over a decade as an adjunct senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales and serves on the industry advisory board for its School of Computer Science and Engineering, giving him a deep understanding of what motivates and empowers the next generation of technologists, and he has been a consistent champion of non-traditional pathways into technology careers.

He is a co-founder of SECedu, a free Australian tertiary cyber training program, and has served on several boards, including two years on the board of Silicon Quantum Computing.