The AI Adoption Podcast

Done well, AI in customer service needs more people, not fewer. That runs against the entire case being made for it. Matt Price has built a company on exactly this claim, and he brings the evidence. Matt Price, Founder and Chief Executive of Crescendo, argues that the industry has spent twenty years optimising for the wrong thing. He names deflection, the practice of stopping customers reaching a...

Every technologist repeats the same phrase: AI with humans in the loop. André Lacroix inverts it. The future, he argues, is purpose-based, people-centric leadership with AI in the loop, and the difference is not semantic. André Lacroix, Chief Executive of Intertek Group plc, makes the case that emotional intelligence, not technology, will decide which organisations win the AI decade. His reasoning...

Large organisations are achieving limited benefits from AI projects. Yet, their appetite to invest more is undiminished. Rob Lunn, Product Manager at Fnality, a regulated wholesale payment system that settles transactions on-chain, argues that this paradox is not just a general business problem. In financial services, where unit cost discipline and regulatory compliance define survival, it is a st...

Taiwan makes 95% of the world's AI servers. The rest of the world runs on what Taiwan builds. Sega Cheng, Co-Founder and Chairman of iKala, argues that Taiwan's hardware leadership is the clearest illustration of how foundational AI infrastructure has become: one country manufactures, assembles, and supplies the chips and servers that power AI for virtually the entire world. From that vant...

AI tools at Bank of America are already delivering around 20% productivity improvements in coding. That figure is live, not projected and from the executive responsible for technology and operations in the bank's French entity. He argues it will increase as the technology matures. Yet his most insistent point is this: at every consequential decision point, a human must remain in the loop. The...

Hallucination in AI is not always a failure to be fixed. For some organisations it is a design choice. That observation, made on stage at Brunel University of London, is one of nine tensions this conversation surfaces, examines, and poses as challenges to be resolved as we live and work with AI. This is the Season 3 opening episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, recorded live in front of an audience...

Two seasons in, many lessons to learn. Season 3 information at the end of this post. Every organisation investing in AI is focused on the Tech Stack: infrastructure, platforms, applications. That stack matters. But there is a second stack that barely features in strategy discussions or boardroom agendas, and Professor Ashley Braganza believes it is where the real value from AI adoption is either c...

Most banks now have impressive-looking AI. Very few have AI that genuinely transforms their customers experience. The gap between a polished interface and a transformed organisation is wider than most leaders want to admit, and it comes down to foundations that were never built properly in the first place. Moush Verma, Senior AI Lead at Santander UK, makes the case that the biggest mistake organis...

AI systems today cannot learn from a single conversation. Turn one off, wipe its context, and it will remember nothing. Every interaction has to start again from scratch. For organisations investing heavily in AI, this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural limitation that shapes everything from deployment strategy to governance. Babak Hodjat, Chief AI Officer at Cognizant, makes the cas...

Organisations selling AI-powered election-winning services are operating openly. Deep fakes can place words in the mouths of public figures before any rebuttal reaches its audience. An estimated 95% of content on social media carries some form of AI manipulation. These are not hypothetical futures; they are the present. Dawn Butler, Member of Parliament for London’s Brent East constituency and mem...

The companies driving the AI revolution are spending more on infrastructure this year than they earned last year. The contracts that justify those investments have not yet been fully realised. And somewhere in the middle of that gap sits a question that no analyst, executive or policymaker has cleanly answered: is this a sustainable expansion, or the largest technology bubble ever constructed? Tom...

The gap between AI capability and workforce readiness is widening. Billions are flowing into AI models and data centres, yet the people expected to use these tools remain largely untrained, unsupported, and very exposed. That gap, left unaddressed, could trigger a wave of job losses more severe than anything seen since deindustrialisation in the 1980s. Euan Blair, Founder and CEO of Multiverse, ma...

Hollywood is not being disrupted quietly. A 12-year-old with a laptop has the potential to produce a film that rivals studio budgets. The traditional linear franchise model, from comics to cinema to merchandise to theme parks, is giving way to something far less predictable and far more open. Samantha Tauber, Founder of VNCCII and creator of a science futures franchise that spans music, storytelli...

In this episode, I speak with Eric Tyree, Head of Data and AI at Virgin Media O2, about a reality many organisations are still avoiding. AI adoption does not start with technology. It starts with pressure in the market. Eric describes a telecoms sector where services are commoditised, margins are tight, and customers are quick to leave. That context shapes everything at VM02. AI is built directly...

In this episode, I speak with Janusz Marecki, AI Partner at Ahrens, and the conversation cuts through the optimism that often surrounds AI. Janusz sets out a clear position. Current AI systems have fundamental shortcomings. They approximate answers rather than produce deterministic outcomes. Every token carries a probability of error, and those errors compound as outputs grow. This is not a margin...

In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Sahar Danesh from the British Standards Institution about the role that standards play in the adoption and governance of artificial intelligence. Many organisations are racing to adopt AI. Productivity gains and competitive pressure are driving large and rapid investments. Yet this conversation revealed a striking gap between adoption and go...

This is for anyone recruiting or looking for a job or a new role. In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Annabel Ashley from Indeed about AI adoption where it matters most, inside day-to-day operations at the sharp end of hiring. Indeed is already an AI-enabled organisation. Annabel shared that over 70% of Indeedians use AI at least weekly, and over 80% say it adds value to their...

In this episode of the AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Chelsea Chamberlain, Chief Technology Officer at Roc Technologies, about to get an in-depth understanding of AI adoption across the UK public and private sectors. Chelsea sees a clear divergence in pace. Private sector firms in sectors such as banking, legal and pharmaceuticals are accelerating. Public sector organisations, on the other hand...

AI “of the people, by the people, for the people”. I’ve taken the words from the closing lines of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to describe my discussion with Josh Tan from Public AI. Josh argues that AI should be treated as public infrastructure, closer to railways, highways, libraries, utilities, and the internet than to a premium service owned by a handful of companies. The context is stark. Two...

AI adoption in financial and professional services is being sold as a technology story. Olivia Larkin makes the case that it is really a workforce transformation story. In her words, ‘AI transformation is change management and it needs to be managed in that way by a business.’ Olivia leads skills and workforce policy at the City of London Corporation. She works across the UK, not just the Square M...

In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Sumeet Bhatia from Cisco about the changing role of AI in defence and security. The discussion stays close to operational reality rather than abstract theory. We explore how AI now operates at a speed that humans cannot match. That speed allows threats to be detected earlier and systems to respond before damage spreads. At the same time, it...

Cash transactions are disappearing fast in the UK, but five million people still rely on cash payments. That tension sits at the heart of this episode. In my conversation with John Howells, Chief Executive of LINK, we explore the sharp fall in cash use, from six in ten payments a decade ago to fewer than one in ten today, and the consequences that follow. For most people, digital payments bring co...

In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Sydney MacGregor from HSBC Innovation Banking about a critically important aspect of AI adoption: funding, risk, and scale. Sydney works with more than 250 enterprise software companies, most of them building AI into their core products. She shares a clear view of the UK AI market, from the surge in early-stage activity to the harder reality...

This episode with Chris Blatchford, CTO at Kingfisher, quickly became a conversation about leadership mindset and AI technology. Kingfisher is best known through its brands such as B&Q and Screwfix. Chris described an organisation that treats AI as a board-level capability. Foundations first, so teams can build safely and repeatedly rather than improvising. Kingfisher’s data lake, Nucleus, and...

Jonathon Palmer from LinkedIn and I spoke about creativity emerging as a serious competitive advantage in AI-driven business. Jonathon made a striking point: AI makes execution easier, so the advantage shifts to the human ability to originate ideas, reframe problems, and stay curious. The discussion also challenged a common assumption in B2B ecosystems. Emotion carries more weight than logic in re...