Event Recap: OneStream World Tour Sydney June 2026
Event date: 17 June 2026
Sydney, NSW - ILUMINA
Post prepared by Leah Diprose, Commercial Director, Data Hive Consulting
On 17 June 2026, Data Hive Consulting joined OneStream for their World Tour event in Sydney and left with a clear conviction: the gap between what most Australian finance teams are operating with today and what's now available to them is wider than most people realise.
We were proud sponsors of the event. We were also proud to watch one of our own clients, Norco CFO Laura Wedmaier, take the stage to share her transformation story in front of a room full of finance leaders. More on that shortly.
From our team we had Martin Kudlik, Head of Professional Services & Founder of Data Hive Consulting; Leah Diprose, Commercial Director, Data Hive Consulting; and Phil Clement, Senior Delivery Consultant, Data Hive Consulting, along for the day.
Contents
Setting the Scene
The Day’s Speakers
The AI Question Every CFO Should Be Asking
Four SensibleAI Agents Built for Finance
The ROI
The Agentic Layer and AI: Two Front Doors. One Architecture.
SensibleAI Clustering Analysis
Planning at Every Level
Your Data Ecosystem, Connected
From Kickoff to Go-Live in 8 Weeks
ESG: No Longer Optional
Voices from the Frontline: The Customer Panel
What This Means for Australian CFOs
References and Resources
Full image gallery
About Data Hive Consulting
Welcome to OneStream - unified finance
1. Setting the Scene
The doors opened at 8am. By the time the keynote began, the room was full — CFOs, Finance Directors, FP&A leaders, and finance transformation professionals from across Sydney and beyond, gathered at the beautiful ILUMINA at Martin Place.
The OneStream World Tour had come to Australia after stops in Europe, and the energy in the room reflected it.
For Data Hive Consulting, it was a proud day on two counts. We were sponsors of the event — one of a strong partner ecosystem. And we had a client on the main stage: Norco CFO Laura Wedmaier, sharing her organisation’s OneStream transformation story in front of several hundred of her peers.
The Innovation Hall ran all day across five zones:
Modern Financial Close
Reporting & Analytics
Express Solutions
ESG
Allocations Management.
The Finance AI Hub drew a steady crowd throughout.
Conversations spilled into breaks and carried through lunch. By the end of the day, one thing was clear: the gap between what most Australian finance teams are operating with today, and what is now available to them, is wider than most people realise.
2. The Day’s Speakers
The day was anchored by OneStream’s ANZ leadership and product team, with the customer panel providing the most grounded and candid perspectives of the event.
OneStream team
Thomas Palmer | Managing Director, OneStream ANZ - Delivered the opening keynote, challenging the room on what the CFO role is becoming, drawing on the emerging expectation that finance leaders take on operational accountability alongside their traditional financial mandate.
Jon Hammersley | Sales Director ANZ, OneStream, ANZ - Set an energising tone from the first minute, framing the day’s agenda and the significance of the World Tour’s first Sydney stop.
Tiffany Ma | AI Product Director, OneStream USA - Delivered a live demonstration of the SensibleAI Agentic Layer, the Finance Analyst agent, and the two-front-door architecture. Also moderated the customer panel.
Andrew Ho | Solution Lead, OneStream ANZ - Led the deep-dive sessions on CPM Express, Financial Planning Express, and Workforce Planning Express, bringing implementation detail and product depth to the afternoon programme.
Nicholas Blazosky | Senior Director, Solution Consulting APAC, OneStream ANZ
Michael Gray | Senior Solution Consultant APC, OneStream ANZ
Customer Panel: “Future-Ready Finance: Building a Smarter Finance Function” Moderated by Tiffany Ma.
Three Australian organisations, three different industries, one consistent message: the transformation is real, the results are measurable, and the time to act is now.
Laura Wedmaier | CFO, Norco
Sofia Semken | SVP Finance Systems, Toll
Suzie Cybulski | Finance Transformation Manager, Endeavour Group
3. The AI Question Every CFO Should Be Asking
Before we get into capabilities and customer stories, there's a framing question worth addressing head-on.
A lot of software vendors are talking about AI right now. Most of them mean they've connected their platform to a general-purpose language model and built a chat interface on top of it.
That's a problem. As one speaker put it plainly:
"Asking a generic LLM for an answer or analysis on a finance question is like asking a confident stranger for their opinion and answer without any of the context."
A generic AI model:
doesn't know your chart of accounts
doesn't know your hierarchies, your business rules, your cube, or your cost centre structure.
It can sound confident and produce a formatted answer, and be completely wrong in ways that matter enormously in finance.
OneStream's approach is different, and the difference is foundational. OneStream has been building financial intelligence for over 15 years, a purpose-built engine that understands the structure of your financial data from the ground up. SensibleAI sits on top of that foundation. It's not AI added to a finance tool. It's AI that was always going to emerge from this kind of financial intelligence platform.
That's why the bar they've set is as high as it is: '80% accurate is 0% useful in finance.' When your AI is grounded in your actual financial model, you can hold it to that standard.
4. Four SensibleAI Agents Built for Finance
OneStream has launched a suite of four AI agents purpose-built for high-value finance work. Each one reflects a different kind of intelligence that finance teams need.
Finance Analyst is your new co-pilot for cube-based financial analysis. Query your cube directly in natural language - execute roll-ups, compliance calculations, and custom logic, investigate cost centre variances, compare actuals against budget, and dig into the drivers behind a performance gap. In seconds. Like having a financial expert who actually knows your model sitting alongside your team.
Search Agent is the fastest way to find finance answers. It combines enterprise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with contextual understanding of finance-specific content — searching across your documents, platform guides, policies, and custom notes. Ask a question, get a trustworthy and explainable answer immediately. No digging, no support ticket, no waiting.
Deep Analysis is your enterprise-wide document analyst. It scans thousands of documents and synthesises answers to high-stakes, high-complexity questions — uncovering patterns and connections across unstructured data that no human team could find at scale. Extract insights from contracts for revenue recognition under AASB 606, work through compliance archives, or synthesise policy bundles — in minutes instead of weeks. This is where AI starts to feel like a genuine step change.
Forecast Agent is your AI partner for SensibleAI Forecast accuracy and explainability. Ask about forecast accuracy, underlying drivers, scenarios, and growth rates in plain finance language — and get answers grounded in your actual forecast data. It identifies forecast gaps across the business with clear severity signals, breaks variance into underlying drivers with full transparency, and generates review-ready comparisons and growth summaries on demand. Walk into forecast reviews with answers already in hand. (Available exclusively for SensibleAI Forecast customers.)
5. The ROI
For a 50-person finance team running 50 AI requests per person per month, the numbers look like this:
$1.94M in reclaimed finance time per year
22,800 hours annually
triple digit ROI.
These figures are validated by real customers:
Cox Enterprises confirmed 23,100 hours saved annually in private preview.
Krispy Kreme achieved 99.19% forecast accuracy at daily, store-level granularity — with 87.5% efficiency gains.
SensibleAI Forecast is delivering 25% improved accuracy and 82% faster forecast cycles across the customer base.
For existing OneStream customers who want AI forecasting without a long implementation runway, SensibleAI Forecast Express offers an 8-week deployment path — 4 weeks Build, 4 weeks Hypercare — using existing cube data. No disruption. No heavy lift.
6. The Agentic Layer and AI: Two Front Doors. One Architecture.
The agentic layer architecture OneStream demonstrated is architecturally significant.
There are two entry points — OneStream and Excel natively, or via Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration — but both paths run through the same governed OneStream Agentic Layer. Same SSO. Same RBAC. Same trusted data.
The Control Tower gives finance leaders full governance visibility: every AI credit consumed, every conversation audited, adoption tracked across agents and users. For finance teams navigating AI governance questions, this is the answer.
The Excel Add-in demonstrated something compelling — Claude working live inside a OneStream-connected spreadsheet, pulling governed data, generating XFGetCell formulas, analysing revenue by segment, and writing variance commentary grounded in source data. Not a chatbot layered on top of a spreadsheet. A finance analyst who knows your numbers, inside the tool your team already uses every day.
7. Performance Intelligence: SensibleAI Clustering Analysis
One of the less-discussed but genuinely powerful capabilities on show was Clustering Analysis.
Most analytics tools segment performance by region or revenue size.
Clustering Analysis allows finance and commercial teams to group entities by any combination of factors they define - for example, it may make more sense to compare stores based on things like: store footprint, distance to nearest competitor, range of SKUs stocked, or any other operational variable.
The insight this unlocks is significant: not all stores performing the same way in the same region are actually alike.
Clustering lets you find out exactly why, and build planning and analysis that reflects operational reality rather than convenient organisational boundaries.
8. Planning at Every Level - Express
Financial Planning Express provides a unified data model across P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, and operational planning, built on Finance Led Modeling principles with Low Code/No Code configuration, designed to scale without requiring IT involvement.
Workforce Planning Express extends this to headcount, position changes, compensation, benefits, and workforce-driven costs. With 50+ pre-built formulas and prebuilt dashboards ready for rapid deployment.
Underpinning both is Line Item Modelling, which supports operational planning, workforce planning, and fixed-term and duration-based scenarios at the level of detail where decisions actually happen.
9. Your Data Ecosystem, Connected
The OneStream Connection Center (GA July 2026) ties the data ecosystem together: Snowflake, Tableau, Power BI, SAP, Databricks, Dynamics 365, Oracle, and Salesforce — all connected through a single governed layer. No fragmented point solutions.
The Tableau connector is now available, with scheduled exports and security via PAT.
Snowflake goes GA in July 2026 - inbound and outbound via SQL API.
The roadmap through H2 2026 adds Databricks, Dynamics 365, Oracle, and SAP write-back and drill-back.
10. From Kickoff to Go-Live in 8 Weeks - CPM Express
CPM Express — OneStream's implementation accelerator — is built from over 1,700 OneStream implementations and is already live with more than 100 customers globally.
The Starter Deployment model runs Analyze → Design → Build → Test → Rollout → Go-Live across a fixed 8-week timeline. No-code. No custom development. No surprises.
The Hydro Tasmania story made this concrete. They began their OneStream implementation in July 2025. By February 2026 — seven months later — they were live with Workforce Planning and Financial Planning, with Consolidation and Management Reporting to follow.
To appreciate what that means: Hydro Tasmania operates 30 hydro stations, 54 dams, 13,000 megalitres of water storage, and 400 kilometres of tunnels moving the equivalent of 27 Sydney Harbours worth of water every single day. Seven months. For an organisation of that operational complexity.
The "it'll take years" objection to enterprise finance transformation is no longer credible.
11. ESG: No Longer Optional
The Sustainability Solution is live - ESG Reporting Manager, AASB S1/S2 Reporting Standards, Carbon Manager, and Carbon Strategy Planner. For Australian companies facing ASRS obligations, it provides a governed, scalable foundation for integrated financial and sustainability reporting. Endeavour Group’s story (below) shows what this looks like in practice.
12. Voices From the Frontline: The Customer Panel
Three Australian businesses shared their experiences at the event, and each one grounded the day's product announcements in operational reality.
Toll (Sofia Semken, SVP Finance Systems) spoke to the weight of accumulated technical debt — too many point solutions, spreadsheets, and workarounds built up over years, with data duplicated across disconnected systems in a complex global environment. The goal is a single source of truth connecting finance, technical teams, and external partners without the duplication. OneStream is how they're getting there.
Endeavour Group (Suzie Cybulski, Finance Transformation Manager) — BWS and Dan Murphy's, spun out of Woolworths in 2021 — has implemented reporting and consolidation, account reconciliations, and ESG calculations and reporting, all managed by finance without IT dependency or complex coding. Their sustainability team has moved entirely off spreadsheets. Emissions reporting is live. They have achieved 100% integrated financial and sustainability reporting under AASB S1/S2. As Suzie noted, the ESG component was a no-brainer — a natural step forward rather than a separate project.
Laura Wedmaier, CFO of Norco, took the stage as part of the panel — and Norco is a Data Hive Consulting client. Norco is an $800M dairy co-op, c. 800 employees. 26 rural agri-solutions stores across regional Australia. A 130-year-old business that Laura described walking into as a "renovators delight" - two ERPs, Excel models that had been running for 25 years, and a finance function that needed rebuilding from the ground up. Data Hive Consulting implemented OneStream at Norco alongside Laura and her team. The financial close has moved from Day 19 to Day 4 — and is still improving. Long-range planning, capital project tracking, and covenant management are all now live capabilities. And those 25-year-old Excel models? Laura told the room they are almost ready to burn the files. For a co-op operating through the volatility of Australian dairy farming — managing input costs, manufacturing complexity, and the aftermath of natural disasters — having a single governed platform that the finance team controls without IT dependency has been genuinely transformational.
These are exactly the kind of outcome we exist to help our clients achieve.
13. What This Means for Australian CFOs
The technology has genuinely caught up to the ambition. AI that is grounded in your financial model. Planning that covers every line item. A governed data ecosystem that connects your entire stack. Implementation timelines measured in weeks, not years.
If your finance team is still spending significant time on manual close processes, variance commentary, or hunting for numbers across disconnected systems — the question is no longer whether better is possible. It's how quickly you can get there.
Customer stories and outcomes
View all customer testimonials.
15. Image Gallery - all images
This post was prepared by Leah Diprose, Commercial Director, Data Hive Consulting. Please feel free to contact Leah if you are interested in understanding what OneStream could do for your business via LinkedIn here.
Data Hive Consulting is a proud OneStream partner. We were a sponsor of the OneStream World Tour Sydney, 17 June 2026.
Explore more about OneStream here.
16. About Data Hive Consulting
Data Hive Consulting specialises in EPM/CPM in ANZ with over 20 years of experience across 150+ organisations. We are a OneStream partner.
If you'd like to understand what's possible for your organisation with EPM/CPM, including OneStream, we'd welcome the conversation - contact us here.
