The Technology Chapter UK

Workshop 1 - Stop the Stall: The Move to a Governed Agentic Workforce

Zach Damasco - Dataiku

In 2026, the challenge for the CIO has shifted from proving AI's potential to managing its complexity. With 84% of UK CIOs admitting that agents are being built faster than IT can provide oversight, the primary barrier to scale is no longer the technology itself, but a disconnect between business intent and technical control.

Workshop 2 - Building a Digital Resilience Strategy in the Age of AI

Greg Ainslie-Malik  - Splunk

AI is fundamentally shifting the landscape of digital resilience by dismantling long-standing assumptions about trust, visibility, and correctness. As identity becomes easier to fake and data volume outpaces our ability to interpret it, relying on traditional operational models is no longer sufficient. In this session, we will explore how you can build a winning digital resilience strategy in the era of AI, considering the necessity of evolving your operational architecture to prioritise continuous validation, system-wide orchestration, and embedded governance. We will discuss what these shifts mean for your leadership and how to keep your organisation on solid ground as the rules of the game continue to change.

Workshop 3 - AI and End-User Computing: From Hype to Hardened Foundations

Mike Starnes & Gavin Connolly - Nerdio

As AI adoption accelerates, many organisations are discovering a gap between promise and reality. Expectations have outpaced capability, often because AI is being layered onto fragile, device-centric environments; effectively building on sand.
Meanwhile, IT leaders face rising compute costs, variable workloads, and stricter data sovereignty demands. This session explores how modern virtual workspaces provide the stable foundation AI needs, balancing performance, cost efficiency, and compliance to enable a sustainable digital workplace.

Workshop 4 - How AI is Shaping Business Strategy and Performance

Callum Young - Amdaris

AI is everywhere, but real business impact is still hard to pin down. This interactive workshop cuts through the noise to show how organisations can turn AI ambition into measurable results.

Led by the Chief Growth Officer of InsightAI; driving rapid, data-led transformation, this session explores how to identify high-value use cases, accelerate delivery through rapid prototyping, and build the foundations for scalable AI success. Expect practical examples, honest lessons, and a clear view of what actually works when it comes to embedding AI into your commercial strategy.

Workshop 6 - The next chapter of workforce management. Unlock speed, scale, and ROI with Quinyx

Laurence Painell - Quinyx

Join Quinyx as they explore how workforce management is rapidly evolving from a back-office function into a strategic driver of business performance. As AI, real-time data, and operational complexity increase, organisations are rethinking how they plan, deploy, and engage their frontline workforce.

In this session, they will explore how AI-driven workforce management is already delivering value today - and how organisations can move from reactive processes to proactive, data-led decision-making.

Workshop 7 - Continuous Modernisation: Rebuilding While Running in the AI Era

Dave Hillier - Appian

Enterprises are moving away from high-stakes, "all-or-nothing" transformation programs in favor of continuous, modular modernisation. Traditionally, leaders have been trapped in a modernisation dilemma: accumulate technical debt or risk a disruptive "rip-and-replace" project that often fails to meet its original goals. This paralysis stems from a systems-first approach that ignores how work actually flows across the enterprise.

This session provides a pragmatic roadmap for continuous modernisation. We will explore how to decouple user experiences from aging backends, using a process orchestration layer to encapsulate legacy complexity without interrupting service delivery. We will also examine how to utilise AI App Generation (AppGen) to translate business intent into secure, modern applications, eliminating the "swivel chair" manual workarounds that stifle your team’s productivity.

Workshop 8 - Your Competitive Edge Isn’t AI – It’s Your Data

Bernadette Wightman & Owen Walker - Iron Mountain

Years of digital transformation have created a data deluge that most organisations are still struggling to harness. Enterprises generate over 1,300 exabytes of dark data every day, and 90% of the world’s data has been created in just the last two years. That’s not just noise — it’s untapped potential. Join our roundtable to explore how your true advantage in the AI era lies not in the algorithms, but in the data you already have. Discuss why so much of it remains dark, unused, or siloed — and explore how discoverability and connectivity are the keys to unlocking its value. It’s time to turn your data into your most powerful asset.

Workshop 9 - From Projects to Products: Rewiring Technology Delivery for Long-Term Value

Khadir Fayaz - CBRE

Workshop 10 - Comparing Notes: What's Actually Working in AI Analytics Rollouts

Will Savage & Deb Lee - Omni 

Every leader in this room is making the same bet from a slightly different angle: that AI will change how their business operates, not just how their data team works. Most of the real learning: what's actually moving a number, what's stalling, what's quietly failing: is currently locked in people's heads. This workshop is built to surface it.

Workshop 11 - Real-Time AI Needs Real-Time Data: Closing the Gap Between Your Models and Reality

Ben Gamble - Ververica

Enterprise AI investments are stalling not because the models are bad, but because the data feeding them is stale. Fraud models scoring yesterday's transactions. Recommendation engines running off last night's batch. Agents making decisions on data that is already out of date.

This session tackles the infrastructure gap beneath most AI deployments: the absence of a real-time data layer. Ben Gamble will show how stream processing becomes the connective tissue between enterprise data sources and AI and agentic systems, enabling models to reason over what is happening now, not what happened.

Workshop 12 - Digital Trust by Design: Governance, Compliance & Accountability

Diana Kennedy - Natwest