Becoming an AI-First Business
30 years of technology shifts

Eighteen months ago we set out to work out what AI meant for our business and we've been recording the decisions ever since. This session walks through them in the order they arrived.

Whether to build a semantic layer or wait for the tooling to mature. Whether to standardise on one AI vendor or run several in parallel. What to do about projects going nowhere, and how to tell in the moment between an experiment that hasn't paid off yet and one that won't.

These arrive in roughly the same order for everyone. Some are probably in front of you now.

You'll leave with:

• The sequence of decisions any organisation faces on this modernisation path
• What running two AI tools in parallel taught us about adoption, and where the usage data ran against expectations
• The experiments we stopped, and how we decided to stop them
• What we'd do differently starting from today

Plus: The AI Maturity Curve, a one-page chart of the five stages, described plainly. Read it and find yours.

This session is for you if you're facing the same decisions and would rather work from someone else's evidence than your own guesswork.

Thirty years of building systems, through the internet, databases and the cloud. Every one of those shifts rewarded the organisations that got their data right first.