Keynotes and workshops

Most enterprise AI pilots look like successes at six months. By month eighteen, the majority have stalled — not because the technology failed, but because the operating model around it was never redesigned. This talk unpacks the five structural gaps that kill second-cycle budgets: ownership diffusion, capability debt, governance without teeth, integration friction, and the measurement trap. Drawn from direct work with large enterprises across Europe and the Middle East, it gives leaders a concrete diagnostic they can run before the next budget cycle begins.

The question is no longer whether to use AI agents — it is which decisions to delegate, at what confidence threshold, with what human review cadence. The Tiered Autonomy Framework maps five levels of delegation from fully supervised to fully autonomous and gives leaders a practical method for placing each business process on the right tier. The session works through three live examples — procurement approvals, customer escalation routing, and compliance review — and closes with a governance design sprint participants can run back in their organisations.

"What is our AI strategy?" is the wrong question. The right question is: which parts of our operating model will AI make obsolete, and which will it compound? Boards and executive teams that frame the question correctly avoid the two failure modes — underspending on integration and overspending on experiments. This session reframes the board agenda, offers a three-question diagnostic for evaluating AI readiness, and outlines what the next eighteen months of enterprise AI investment should actually prioritise.