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In the city where Alan Turing asked whether machines can think, BCN brought together Microsoft, our clients and some of the sharpest minds in AI to tackle the question every leader is asking: how do you turn AI into real business value – safely, and with your people on board?
6 min read
Opening the day, BCN CEO Rob Davies told the story of Kodak – the company that invented the digital camera, then didn’t take the chance to change. It’s a warning that lands hard when AI agents are overtaking human traffic online, and when Rob suggested an AI could win a Nobel Prize within 30 years. His challenge to the room: think laterally about what AI could mean for your organisation.
BCN’s CTO, Mark Rotheram, explained that while models are changing exponentially, most business challenges can already be solved with earlier ones. Part of our job, he said, is to temper that pace of change inside your organisation – so you move with purpose, not panic.
Testimonial
Microsoft opened the agenda with ‘AI and the Future of Business’. Liz Leigh-Bowler and It’s Apay Obang-Oyway shared Microsoft’s view of the Frontier Firm: organisations that look at business outcomes through an AI lens – a better employee experience, a better customer experience, reshaped end-to-end processes and a steeper innovation curve.
Liz was candid about what’s happened since Copilot launched. Adoption has been inconsistent, change management is often missing, and value only arrives with accountability and consistent use that genuinely changes how people work.
Apey set out the route from idea to impact: experiment, pilot in a sandbox, then scale across the organisation – all resting on data readiness, governance and security, and leadership in transformation. Microsoft also shared five stages of adoption and four habits of Frontier Firms.
The common thread: AI works best where good-quality data – structured and unstructured – meets well-understood process, with granular monitoring for governance and security as agents spread across the business.
For many in the room, the stand-out session was ‘Adoption for Success’ from Ban Hasan, AI & Data Innovation Consultant at BCN, on the human factors of AI adoption. Her core point: deployment and adoption are two different stages, and they’re too often treated as one.
AI doesn’t behave like a traditional change management problem. It can create new work for other people, and it asks individuals to check things they’ve never had to check before – context, expertise, traceability, authority, standards and time.
Ban’s answer is a shared AI workflow, built on shared data, rules, ownership and judgement, that carries an organisation from deployment, through adoption, to value. Adoption, she noted, is where most organisations get stuck.
“The things that get in the way are properties of people, not the tech.”
Ban Hasan, AI & Data Innovation Consultant, BCN
Fraser Dear, BCN’s Head of AI and Data Innovation, showed what’s possible right now. He shared how Panira, former England rugby player Luther Burrell’s company, uses multiple dedicated AI agents to build a 360-degree external profile of an organisation, and explored the role of data in elite sport and how AI is disrupting consultancy.
Then the room met Jules: an AI agent that interviewed attendees through a QR code and played back what’s slowing organisations down. The answers were telling – data quality, skills and confidence. None of them are technology problems.
Our ‘AI in Action’ client panel, hosted by Emma Portlock, brought together organisations at different stages of the journey – from data and governance foundations through to agentic AI – on both sides of the public–private line. The common thread was people: secure data and AI that takes on the grind free your teams to do the thinking – and lift job satisfaction too.
Two executive breakouts followed. In ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Automating Admin with your Current Licence’, Andy James and Fraser Dear showed how much value is already sitting in licences you own – Copilot Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot for individuals, Power Platform for teams, and Fabric and Foundry across the organisation. In ‘Human-Centred AI Adoption: Bridging Strategy, Technology and Adoption’, Ban and Mark generated AI use cases live with attendees, focusing on the processes most in need of help.
Across the public and private sector, the barrier to AI value is rarely the technology. It’s governance, data and people. That’s where we help. We get your data estate ready, put the right governance and security in place, and work with your business leaders to find use cases with a real return. Then we help your people adopt them – so AI changes how work actually gets done.
With thanks to Microsoft, our event sponsor, and to our clients at Torus, Oaka and Wealth at Work for sharing their experiences on our panel. Whether you’re ready for change or just curious about what’s possible, we’re happy to chat.
It’s people first, always.
