Juvare Elevate ’26 has just wrapped, and I’m still buzzing from it. We gathered at the RACV Club in Melbourne from 21–23 July, and if you were there, I hope you’re feeling the same energy I am. If you couldn’t make it this year, I wanted to share a few of the moments and themes that stuck with me.
The value of being in the room
I’ll say it every year because it’s true every year: it was great to see everyone face to face again.
Everyone is busy. Travel budgets are tight. It’s easier than ever to justify staying home and catching the highlights later. But every time we do this, I’m reminded of what gets lost when we don’t make the trip. There’s something about spending real time with our community, in person, that no video call replicates. I always leave energised, and this year was no exception.
What struck me most was watching our clients share what they’re doing with WebEOC and our other products. There’s a real pride in that room, people standing up and showing off the systems they’ve built, the processes they’ve refined, the problems they’ve solved. And they should be proud. Every year, this conference becomes a place where clients build new networks and learn from each other, often solving problems they didn’t even know someone else had already cracked.
This year, the presentations from SA CFS, SA SES and WA DFES were a great example of that. Different organisations, different challenges, but each one gave the room something to take home and think about.
That’s really the heart of why we do this. The networking opportunities Elevate gives us, the unfiltered feedback on our products, the honest conversations about the challenges our clients are facing in their own organisations, are invaluable. It’s not always comfortable feedback, but it’s real, and it sets us up for a genuinely productive year ahead as we keep building solutions that solve actual problems, not imagined ones.
From “Where does AI fit?” to seeing it in action
Last year, we left Elevate excited about AI, but honestly a bit fuzzy on the details. Everyone could feel that it was going to matter, but exactly where it would fit into our clients’ day-to-day work, and how, wasn’t fully clear yet.
This year felt different. We got clarity.
Watching people get hands-on with JAI was the highlight for me. Clients weren’t just hearing about the possibilities, they were querying their own data, in their own words, in ways that could genuinely help them make better decisions in an emergency. Some were going a step further and building their own agents to pull information into their systems automatically. That shift, from “What could this do?” to “Here’s what I just built,” is exactly the kind of progress we hoped for when we started talking about AI in this space. It’s no longer an abstract promise. It’s a tool people are already shaping to fit their own operations.
Building the roadmap, together
One of the pieces I’m most proud of from this year’s conference happened on Day 1, before the main sessions even got underway: bringing the Lessons Management Module community together to build out a roadmap for the product.
This wasn’t us presenting a plan and asking for a rubber stamp. It was client-driven, shaped by the people who use the module every day and understand better than anyone where it needs to go next. Sessions like that are exactly what Elevate should be for, not just a chance to showcase where we’ve been, but a working session on where we’re headed, with the community that will actually use what we build.
Looking ahead
Elevate ’26 gave us a lot to carry forward: new client relationships, a sharper picture of how AI actually helps in the field, and a roadmap for Lessons Management shaped by the people who’ll use it. Most of all, it gave us another reminder of why we keep making the trip, year after year, to spend that time together.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Melbourne. See you at the next one.
