Harnessing AI
Your leadership leaves speaking one language, clear on what AI is, what it is good at and where it quietly gets things wrong.
This is where everyone starts and nobody skips it. You do the work in the room, testing the tools and building with them, and you leave knowing what to build first, who owns it and where the risk sits. It is fast, and the learning is faster than people expect.
Your people already use AI. They are just not telling you.
Three quarters of knowledge workers already use AI, and around half of them hide it from their managers. Work is being drafted, code is being written and data is leaving your business without anyone owning it. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI. It is whether you lead it or lag behind it.
Four parts, all hands on
No slides to sit through. Your leadership builds, tests and decides together, and leaves with a shared way of working.
Context
What AI actually is, where it came from and the types of AI that matter. The hype set against the operating reality, so you can tell the signal from the noise.
The art of the possible
Directing the machines, not playing with toys. The tools that matter for thinking, building and creating, used with clear judgement rather than clever prompts.
Ownership
Why AI without governance becomes debt. What AI can be in your business and what it must never be, and who actually owns the decisions.
Putting it to work
What this means for you, and the one thing each leader commits to start and to stop before they leave the room.
AI is a brilliant intern, not a wise colleague.
Three exercises, real outputs
Test the limits
Build a brand and an ad with the tools, then pull apart what was good, what was generic and what was wrong, and where your judgement mattered.
Create an ad
Turn your script into a production-ready prompt and a finished concept, and decide what would need to change before a client ever saw it.
Define your AI principles
The guardrails, the data that is never allowed in the tools and the decisions AI can never make on your behalf.
What your team leaves holding
Dan Ilett chairs the City CIO Club in London and writes The Executive Summary, a newsletter read by FTSE 350 leaders. As a behavioural futurist he writes and speaks on how AI is reshaping demand, and what makes people act, buy and change.
He led transformation programmes inside Virgin Money and Thomas Cook, and has advised teams at IBM, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Cognizant and Equinix. He came up through journalism, writing for the Financial Times, and was founding editor of CoinDesk.
Get your leadership AI ready
Half a day. One company in the room. Book a time and tell me where your team is right now.
Book a time to talk