Jane Livesey has been appointed managing director of Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, marking a major leadership shift for the global tech giant’s regional operations.
Ms Livesey, who has been leading Salesforce across Australia and New Zealand since 2020, will take over the reins from Steven Worrall, who announced his departure earlier this year after nearly nine years in the role.
Prior to joining Salesforce, Ms Livesey spent more than two decades at Accenture, including as managing director of its ANZ business. At Microsoft, she will be responsible for driving the company’s cloud, AI and enterprise technology strategy.
“We are entering an era where AI and cloud innovation will reshape the way businesses, governments, and communities work and thrive,” Ms Livesey said in a statement.
Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood has been appointed co-head of the Australian Public Service’s policy evaluation profession, joining Shane Johnson in the leadership role.
Ms Wood, who will continue at the PC, will help steer the APS towards stronger evidence-based policy making and evaluation practices. The move is part of a broader push to embed evaluation as a central capability within the public service, improving how programs are assessed and refined.
Elsewhere, the Australian Information Industry Association’s general manager of policy and media Siew Lee Seow has joined SAP as industry advisor for the public sector.
Ms Seow spent almost two years in the role. In her previous positions, she championed pro-innovation and pro-safety approaches to AI and scam policy, helping to shape responses to complex national digital challenges.
At venture capital firm Main Sequence Ventures, a wave of promotions has been announced, with Alezeia Brown and Jun Qu promoted to principal, reflecting their contributions to the firm’s investment strategy across decarbonisation, industrial productivity and space.
Also stepping up are Danielle Haj Moussa, Emerald Scofield, Jason Whitfield, and Alex Romero, who all move into investment manager roles, bolstering the firm’s engagement across AI, robotics, biotechnology, healthcare and quantum.
Managing partner Bill Bartee said the promotions reflected the team’s “expertise, passion, and deep knowledge”, as well as the firm’s commitment to developing the next generation of deep-tech leaders.
Peter Kaliaropoulos has been appointed as the new chairman of Optus. He brings decades of experience in telecommunications and technology to the role.
At the same time, the telco has also begun hiring a new cohort of privacy specialists, with the company highlighting the positions in a LinkedIn post as central to its efforts to rebuild trust with customers, partners and the broader community after its 2022 data breach.
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