The AI Adoption Podcast
by Professor Ashley Braganza
The AI Adoption Podcast where cutting-edge artificial intelligence meets real-world relevance. The show offers an accessible, approachable take on some of the most complex topics in AI, making the effects of AI understandable and engaging for everyone, from curious beginners to tech-savvy professionals and business leaders.Each episode features in-depth conversations with leading AI policy makers, researchers, innovators, regulators, ethicists, and thought leaders. You will hear diverse voices, even sceptics, ensuring balanced and lively discussions, exploring the adoption of AI.
Episodes
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AI tokens feel like monopoly money, but the bills are real
Tokens are a form of money that few employees or AI users understand. Leaders can budget for a salary with confidence. They cannot forecast an AI agent's token usage with any accuracy, and once that agent runs a core service, switching it off stops being a realistic option. Dimitris Perdikou,...
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Leaders Who Do Not Value Data Slow AI Adoption
Leadership teams can explain how they make money, but not their data. Ask about data architecture, and the reply my guest voices from the boardroom is a question: “Why do I need to know that?” This conversation makes suggests that this is a cultural problem rather than a technical one. Claire...
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Geopolitics Makes AI Access to GIS Data a Board Priority
Opening a hydrant map, as an example of vital infrastructure, to AI speeds up repairs and widens access. The data that tells a crew to fix the hydrant near the hospital first could also show an adversary where a city is weakest. Dino Ravnić, Co-founder and CEO of GIS Cloud, argues that AI is the...
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AI Agents Overlaid On Fragmented Processes Create Digital Clutter, Not Value
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…
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Zurich Insurance Is Building One AI Strategy Across Rival Regions (Part 1)
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…
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43 Police Forces, One AI Mission and Little Power to Mandate
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...
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Link Strategic AI Governance to Everyday Customer Trust
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,...
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Organisation Spaghettification is the Barrier to Enterprise AI Adoption
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...
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Rethinking, Reimagining is The AI Leadership Test
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…
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AI Advisers in the Workplace Will Reshape Culture, Ready or Not
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…
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Public sector AI faces a choice between innovation and cuts
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,...
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AI Tools Drive New Crimes and Social Behaviours, and Policing Is Behind
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...
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Every professional is an AI manager, whatever their job title
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...
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Middle Management Has No Place in the Agentic AI Economy
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...
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Sovereignty, Trust and Context Are Not Three Separate AI Problems
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...
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AI's Proven, Its Value Isn't
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…
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Deflection Is The Ugly Word Quietly Wrecking Your Customer Service
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...
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AI With Humans in the Loop Gets Leadership Exactly Backwards
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...
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AI Is Underachieving Benefits and Organisations Keep Spending Anyway
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.…
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Intelligence Is the Third Utility. Taiwan Proves It.
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,...
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Bank of America's AI Results Are In. The Human Override Stays
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...
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The Future With AI
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....
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Death by a Thousand AI Licences and other lessons from Season 2
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...
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Your AI Use Cases and Proofs of Concept Are Not Evidence of Progress
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...
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Agentic AI Will Always Need Constant Re-Engineering: The Future of Business Transformation
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...
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Democracy, Bias, and the Case for Ethical AI: Data has history
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…
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The Companies That Invented The AI Race May Not survive It
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...
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Your company's AI training programme is probably a waste of money
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...
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Hollywood Is Crumbling. The Question Is Who Pivots Fast Enough
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....
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AI Without Transformation is a Waste of Investment
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...
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A Reality Check on AI Diffusion
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.…
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Are Organisations Sleepwalking Into an AI Governance Gap?
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...
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AI in Recruitment: Friend or Foe?
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....
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Chelsea Chamberlin on whether AI Adoption is Being Driven by Fear or Strategy?
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...
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AI “of the People” or AI Oligopoly? Governments Face a Sovereignty Reckoning
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…
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London’s Opportunity To Lead In Responsible and Trusted AI
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...
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Trust, Explainability, and Human Oversight in AI Defence and Security Systems
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...
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Five Million People Still Use Cash. Digital Payments Are Moving On Without Them
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...
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AI companies are judged against extreme growth, not just peers
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.…
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Board-level AI Strategy and Adoption at Scale by Kingfisher’s Chris Blatchford
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...
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LinkedIn’s Jonathon Palmer on Creativity, Confidence and Careers in AI Shaped Workplaces
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...
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Best Wishes for the Season and 2026
As 2025 ends, thanks to everyone who joined The AI Adoption Podcast. A recurring message is: AI adoption isn't a technology issue alone; it is a strategic transformation, leadership, and human challenge. Regulation & Trust • Regulation isn't the enemy of innovation Lord Tim Clement-Jones • AI...
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Human/AI Trade-offs Shaping AI Adoption
AI adoption often looks rational on paper while feeling human in practice. That insight sat at the centre of my conversation with Ian Smith from Baseline, and it informed the tone of our discussion. Ian spoke about reaching a point in his career where technology no longer carried the whole story....
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Mind the AI Strategy Gap: Ethics and Agentic Workflows
In this episode I speak with Paul O’Sullivan, SVP of Solution Engineering for the UKI and Chief Technology Officer for the UK, from Salesforce. Paul traces 75 years of AI development, from early machine intelligence ideas to the breakthroughs that brought us to today’s agentic AI era. Paul…
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Learning, Not Technology, Will Decide Who Loses Jobs to AI
In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Heather Black, CEO of Supermums. Heather created Supermums after realising that a flexible, well-paid career in tech was something many mothers could thrive in. Heather explains why she focuses on this demographic. Women remain...
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Is Legacy Leadership Holding Back AI Adoption?
In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Neha Kabra from McKinsey about how AI is reshaping leadership, customer service, employees’ roles and the expectations placed on boards. Neha explains why legacy leadership approaches are struggling. Many leadership skills remain the same,...
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Today’s AI is like a ZX81, yet the market thinks it is fully mature, insights from Andrew McNally
I recorded this episode with Andrew McNally, who has spent 35 years working across fund management, investment banking and advising family offices. Andrew has witnessed several major technological shifts, including the dot-com boom and bust, and I wanted to hear his view on how today’s AI wave...
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Marco Forgione on AI Reshaping the Future of International Trade
In this episode of the AI Adoption Podcast, I interviewed Marco Forgione, Director General of the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade. Marco’s extensive experience and knowledge provides deep insights into the strategic use of AI in international trade. He argues that AI is...
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Kate Jones on Shaping the UK’s Digital Regulatory Environment
In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Kate Jones, CEO of the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF), which brings together four regulators: Ofcom, the ICO, the CMA and the FCA to work together on regulating online and digital services. We discuss the work does with the...
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AI Meets Blockchain: Dawn of the Agentic Economy
🎧 In this episode of The AI Adoption Podcast, I speak with Yves Bollinger, General Manager at Plan.Net Studios, part of the Serviceplan Group. We explore the fascinating intersection of AI and blockchain and how decentralised technologies such as the Masumi Protocol built on the Cardano…
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About this show
The AI Adoption Podcast where cutting-edge artificial intelligence meets real-world relevance. The show offers an accessible, approachable take on some of the most complex topics in AI, making the effects of AI understandable and engaging for everyone, from curious beginners to tech-savvy professionals and business leaders.Each episode features in-depth conversations with leading AI policy makers, researchers, innovators, regulators, ethicists, and thought leaders. You will hear diverse voices, even sceptics, ensuring balanced and lively discussions, exploring the adoption of AI.
Hosted by
Professor Ashley Braganza
Categories