Jason Ross speaking at ACA Business & Agency Leadership 2026
18–20 October 2026 | QT Sydney
Time Under Tension co-founder Jason Ross will be speaking at Advertising Council Australia’s Business & Agency Leadership 2026, a three-day residential programme designed for experienced agency managers preparing to take the next step into senior leadership.
The programme brings together some of Australia’s leading agency CEOs, founders and business leaders to explore what it takes to build and lead an agency through a period of significant change. Across three days, delegates will work through leadership, commercial strategy, talent, pricing, transformation and the future shape of the industry.
Jason’s session, The AI Dividend: Moving from Experiment to Efficiency, forms part of day two’s focus on “futuring the industry”, and will examine how agency leaders can move their organisations beyond scattered AI experimentation and towards more meaningful changes in how work gets done.
Over the past few years, most agencies have become familiar with generative AI tools, and plenty of people are already using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and other platforms in their day-to-day work. The harder challenge is turning that individual experimentation into a repeatable organisational capability.
Jason will explore what needs to happen next: identifying workflows where AI can make a meaningful difference, building the skills and confidence of teams, introducing reusable AI workflows and agents, and putting the right governance around them.
This is particularly important for agencies because AI changes more than productivity. It has implications for pricing, resourcing, margins, team structures and ultimately the value clients expect agencies to provide. The opportunity is not simply to do the same work a little faster, but to reconsider which parts of the agency operating model should work differently.
Jason brings more than 20 years of experience across digital, customer experience and agency leadership. Before co-founding Time Under Tension, he led Reactive’s Sydney office, became a Managing Director at Accenture Interactive following its acquisition, and later served as VP Head of frog in Australia and New Zealand.
ACA Business & Agency Leadership 2026 runs from 18–20 October at QT Sydney, with a programme featuring leaders from WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Special Australia, Howatson+Company and other leading agencies.
https://advertisingcouncil.org.au/courses/aca-business-agency-leadership