The AI Adoption Podcast

This is Part Two of a two-part conversation, and it moves from the global picture to adoption inside the organisation. Ericson Chan, Group Chief Information and Digital Officer at Zurich Insurance Group, makes the case that boards should judge AI by the value it delivers across a portfolio, not by a pipeline of individual projects, proofs of concept and use cases. Ericson explains that agents mark...

Three regions are building AI for three different reasons. The US pushes frontier models towards AGI, China embeds applied AI into manufacturing and logistics, and Europe builds trust through risk based regulation. A global insurer has to operate inside the three at once. Ericson Chan, Group Chief Information and Digital Officer at Zurich Insurance Group, makes the case that a multinational needs...

The Home Secretary has charged PoliceAI with making policing in England and Wales "the most AI enabled police force in the world", yet each force keeps its own technology, risk appetite and culture. Proving that an AI tool works is not the hard part; scaling it within one force and then from one force to the next is. Dylan Alldridge, Deputy Director for Strategy, Oversight and Coordinati...

NatWest holds every AI system to Europe's standard, wherever it runs. One rulebook across the UK, the EU and North America, chosen because governing to several standards at once multiplies the risk work rather than reducing it. Paul Dongha, Head of Responsible AI and AI Strategy at NatWest Group, makes the case that AI governance earns its keep only when it reaches the branch counter and the c...

Enterprise AI is not working at the speed the market promised. The reason is not the models. It is the complexity that decades of growth leave inside any company. Dhiraj Rajaram, founder and CEO of Mu Sigma, argues that databases record actions and not the decisions and perceptions that produced the actions. He makes the case that many business cases fail because leaders solve problems in the vert...

Many organisations begin with what AI technology can do. Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, argues that is the wrong place to start, and that leaders treating AI as a IT product purchase are ceding ground to those willing to reimagine their purpose, strategy and processes. Vilas makes the case that AI adoption is a question of leadership and organisational courage, not a...

Human in the loop and AI in the loop have become the reflex phrases of enterprise AI. Kerri O'Neill argues that both frame the relationship wrongly, and that the more we picture humans over here and AI over there, the more risk we take on. Kerri O'Neill, Chief People Officer at Ipsos UK and Ireland and its Global AI Workforce Transformation Lead, makes the case that culture, not technology, is whe...

Higher productivity can come from creating more value or consuming fewer resources. For public sector leaders adopting AI, that distinction matters. Ash Thankey, Managing Director and General Manager for Amazon Web Services Public Sector across the UK, Germany and International Organisations, argues that AI is already generating productivity improvements and changing service delivery. Ash cites fi...

Criminals and members of the public are learning and using AI faster than the police can respond. In the parts of policing that handle domestic abuse, non-consensual intimate images and spiking, that gap is not abstract. It shapes what happens when an officer reaches a victim at three in the morning. Claire Hammond, temporary Detective Chief Superintendent at the National Centre for Violence Again...

Stillpoint employs only senior experts and hands the rest to agents. There are no junior staff. The productivity this promises still meets a limit set by human beings. Chris Donahoe, Co-founder of Stillpoint, a corporate affairs firm built to be AI native, argues that the binding constraint on agentic work is now biological rather than technical. Chris explains that building an AI native firm is a...

Ten years in the same sales role now predicts AI resistance. Leo Rogers has seen the pattern often enough to name the mechanism: representatives who hit their number quarter after quarter were never questioned on their method, so the method was never examined. His verdict is that AI adoption is a people problem as much as a technology problem. Leo Rogers, co-founder and CEO of Curvo, which builds...

Sovereignty, trust and context are often addressed separately, yet there is an underlying interplay between them. Send the same prompt to the same large language model and two institutions receive the same answer, so the advantage that remains is the context a firm owns. That context is arguably the ground on which trust has to be earned, and it holds only if the data and intelligence layer beneat...

Cost cutting in customer service ended in 30% pay rises. The organisations that put AI agents live in spring 2025 were, by the autumn, paying 30% above market rate to keep the staff their business case had counted as savings. The AI agents took the easy questions and left people who were harder to replace. Ed Thompson, Senior Vice President for Market Strategy at Salesforce, argues the proof of co...

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...