Perth – Women Creating Value: Aligned and Assured Leadership in Asset Management
Women Creating Value brings together five speakers to share their perspectives and experiences under the theme Aligned and Assured Leadership in Asset Management. Spanning leadership, sustainability, artificial intelligence, operational excellence and reliability, this session highlights the many ways women are contributing to value creation in asset-intensive industries. Through practical insights and real-world reflections, attendees will gain a broader view of how leadership, technical capability and innovation come together to shape stronger organisations and better outcomes.
Date: 21 May 2026
Time: 5.30pm (for 5.45pm start) – 8pm
Venue: City West Lotteries House Conference Room, 2 Delhi Street, West Perth 6005
Cost: Free for AMC members. Non-members: $35, or $30 early bird until 11 May
CPD: 4 CPD points available
Featuring
- Natalia Bustamante – Maintenance Superintendent, Hancock Iron Ore
Leading Through Complexity: Asset Management Leadership in Dynamic Industrial Environments - Daniela Rivas-Aybar, PhD – Sustainability and Carbon Solutions Analyst, Clear Carbon
Managing Sustainability like an Asset - Dr Eunice Sari – Director and Co-Founder, Customer Experience Insight and Western Australian AI Hub
From Data to Decisions: How Humanity-Centred AI is Redefining Value Creation in Asset Management - Jacinta Barnett – Manager Operational Excellence, Dampier Salt, Rio Tinto
Leadership skills for today’s dynamic workplace environments - Shereya Parashar – Senior Reliability Engineer, Woodside Energy
The Accidental Reliability Engineer: Turning Difference into Strength
Abstract and speaker bios:
Natalia Bustamante
Maintenance Superintendent, Hancock Iron Ore
Presentation: Leading Through Complexity: Asset Management Leadership in Dynamic Industrial Environments
Abstract:
Effective asset management in pit-to-port operations demands more than technical expertise — it requires leaders who can navigate ambiguity, build credibility across diverse stakeholder groups, and drive organisational change from within complex, high-stakes environments.
Drawing on over 15 years of experience across the mining Industry in Australia, this presentation explores how the integration challenges faced by new leaders in complex organisations and the multi-level responsibilities of transcendent leadership play out in real-world asset management contexts.
Three key themes will be examined through practical examples: how credibility is built incrementally through performance before transformational change becomes possible; how external pressures — regulatory, operational, and technological — can be leveraged to shift organisational interpretive schemes; and how leading self, others, and organisation simultaneously is essential to delivering safety, reliability, and cost outcomes in large-scale industrial portfolios.
The presentation challenges the “romantic” view of the all-powerful leader, offering instead a grounded perspective on how influence is earned, governance is embedded, and lasting operational improvement is achieved in organisations where authority is shared and expertise is distributed.
Speaker bio:
Natalia Bustamante is an engineering leader with over 15 years of experience across the full asset management lifecycle in Australia’s mining resources sector. Her career traces a deliberate path from the operational front line in asset integrity, maintenance reliability, and engineering governance through to strategic investment planning and capital project delivery, giving her an end-to-end perspective across mining, processing, port, and rail environments.
Spanning both the technical and strategic dimensions of asset management, her experience bridges governance, operational performance, and long-term investment planning. A Senior Practitioner in Asset Management and MBA graduate, Natalia combines deep technical expertise with a strong track record of leading diverse teams and driving measurable outcomes in complex, high-value operations.
Daniela Rivas-Aybar, PhD
Sustainability and Carbon Solutions Analyst, Clear Carbon
Presentation: Managing Sustainability like an Asset
Abstract:
Sustainability is often treated as a reporting requirement, disconnected from how organisations create value. Drawing on her experience at Clear Carbon, Daniela shares her perspective on how improving data integrity, governance, and alignment enables more confident, value-driven decisions across asset-intensive industries. Through this lens, she highlights how managing sustainability like an asset can strengthen leadership, reduce risk, and unlock long-term value.
Speaker bio:
Daniela Rivas Aybar is a Sustainability and Carbon Solutions Analyst at Clear Carbon and holds a PhD from Curtin University. She works with asset-intensive organisations to improve the quality, governance, and alignment of carbon and operational data, enabling more reliable reporting and better decision-making.
Dr Eunice Sari
Director and Co-Founder, Customer Experience Insight and Western Australian AI Hub
Presentation: From Data to Decisions: How Humanity-Centred AI is Redefining Value Creation in Asset Management
Abstract:
AI is changing asset management, but technology alone doesn’t create value. The organizations that achieve the best returns are the ones that put people, governance, and purpose at the heart of their AI strategies.
Drawing from her leadership of the Western AI Hub and over 25 years of experience in human-centered AI, digital transformation, and responsible innovation, Dr. Eunice Sari will explain how organisations in asset-intensive sectors, such as critical minerals, infrastructure, government, and defence, can fully realize the potential of AI while ensuring human judgment, fairness, and accountability remain central.
Key themes include:
– Why “human-centered AI” is essential for governance, not just an afterthought, and what ISO 55000 aligned leadership looks like in the era of agentic AI.
– Real-world examples of AI-driven value creation in mining, infrastructure, and government, where inclusive design principles resulted in more reliable, auditable, and trusted outcomes.
– How women leaders are shaping more resilient, ethical, and high-performing AI systems, and why diverse leadership gives a competitive edge in asset-intensive industries.
– Practical steps for boards, CxOs, and asset managers to transition from AI pilots to consistent, assured, and sustainable AI adoption.
This presentation connects with the event’s three main goals: strengthening leadership skills, promoting governance in line with ISO 55000, and raising the visibility of women leaders in asset-intensive fields.
Speaker bio:
Dr Eunice Sari is a globally recognised pioneer in humanity-centred AI and responsible innovation, with over 25 years of experience leading digital transformation across government, industry, and academia in Australia, Southeast Asia, the USA, and Europe. As Co-Founder and Director of Customer Experience Insight Pty Ltd and Co-Founder of the Western AI Hub, the Western Australia’s most active grassroots AI community, she advises governments, enterprises, and startups on building AI that is accountable, equitable, and human-first. The first Asian female Google Mentor in Product Design and Strategy, she has mentored 500+ startups through Google for Startups and global accelerators, helping founders scale responsible AI products. Eunice holds adjunct academic appointments at UNSW, Edith Cowan University, Curtin University, Charles Darwin University, and the University of Indonesia, where she teaches and researches AI, Human-AI Collaboration, and Responsible AI governance. Winner of the Belmont Migrant of the Year Award 2025 and CCIWA D&I Small Business Finalist, she is also the Co-Founder of Marginpreneur, championing diversity, equity, and inclusion across WA’s innovation and business ecosystem. Eunice’s life’s work is a single conviction: that the most powerful AI systems are the ones designed around people, not the other way around.
Jacinta Barnett
Manager Operational Excellence, Dampier Salt, Rio Tinto
Presentation: Leadership skills for today’s dynamic workplace environments
Abstract:
In a workplace defined by constant change, agile problem-solving has become a critical leadership capability. This presentation will explore the leadership skills required to unlock the full potential of teams, identify hidden talent, and enhance performance. A key focus will be the importance of recognising and developing capability across the workforce, particularly among women, who continue to be underrepresented in leadership roles. By embracing diverse perspectives and fostering inclusive leadership, organisations are better equipped to navigate complexity, respond to challenges, and succeed in today’s dynamic work environment.
Speaker bio:
Jacinta Barnett is an executive mining and industrial leader with more than 23 years of experience across operations, maintenance, asset renewal, business improvement, operational readiness and large-scale transformation in the resources sector. Her career spans mining, rail, ports, chemical processing and facilities, giving her a strong whole-of-value-chain perspective on asset management and operational performance.
Jacinta currently holds the role of Operational Excellence Manager for Dampier Salt Ltd at Rio Tinto and previously served as Acting General Manager, where she helped lead the business through cyclone recovery while maintaining safety focus and production performance. Across her leadership roles, she has been responsible for major operational and capital budgets, business strategy, contract negotiations, licence-to-operate matters and the leadership of large multidisciplinary teams.
Her experience in asset-intensive environments includes leading rail network renewals across track and civil assets, overseeing large contractor workforces and budgets exceeding $500 million, improving rerail productivity, and strengthening safety performance across internal and partner teams. She has also led cultural and performance transformation in operations, including measurable improvements in safety maturity, people experience and productivity across maintenance and production teams.
Jacinta brings a practical and credible leadership voice to asset management, grounded in real operating environments where reliability, safety, people capability and long-term business value must work together. With qualifications in Minerals Process Engineering, Project Management, Business Leadership and the AICD Company Directors Course, she combines technical depth with executive, strategic and governance capability. She is also a current Vice Chairperson of the Pilbara Kimberley University Centre.
Shereya Parashar
Senior Reliability Engineer, Woodside Energy
Presentation: The Accidental Reliability Engineer: Turning Difference into Strength
Abstract:
What starts as an unexpected career turn can become a defining strength. Shereya reflects on her journey from mechanical engineering into reliability, and how she learned to use difference as advantage rather than setback. She shares the lessons that helped her build credibility, simplify decision-making with data, and inspire others to lead from exactly where they are.
Speaker bio:
Shereya is a mechanical engineer by degree and a reliability engineer by pure chance. She entered the field of reliability engineering seven years ago, and what began as an unexpected career path quickly grew into a genuine passion. Today, she can’t imagine doing or being anything else.
She is deeply passionate about connecting people to data to enable informed, confident decision‑making. Shereya has spent much of her career specialising in the development of digital tools and products that support maintenance strategy optimisation, improve asset performance visibility and translate complex data into practical reliability insights.
Beyond the workplace, Shereya applies reliability principles in her day‑to‑day life as a mother, using root cause analysis, continuous improvement, and data‑driven thinking to navigate the beautifully unpredictable realities of family life. Through both her work and her lived experience, she brings a grounded, human perspective to reliability, leadership, and asset management.