It seems that every conference is now an AI conference.
This was borne out at the summer’s flagship London events – the inaugural SXSW London and London Tech Week – where dozens of panels and keynotes were dedicated to the subject. Speakers ranged from those building and deploying AI to those thinking deeply about its societal and cultural impacts. Happily, these aren’t mutually exclusive groups.
We’ve detected a subtle but fundamental change taking place in how AI is being talked about, which has big implications for corporate affairs leaders. Whether or not AI will be deployed isn’t up for debate. But the specifics of how, where and why it is being applied are now centre stage.
This marks a new phase of AI’s dizzying development cycle: politicians tell us we should “turbocharge” AI and “mainline” the technology into the veins of the nation. Management consultants inform us that AI is a “both a strategic tool and an innovative solution”.
What discussion at these conferences showed is how executives are grappling with the trade offs, choices and nuances that adoption brings. It’s no accident that this vibe shift is taking place at the very moment when the role of humans in fine-tuning AI systems — by giving feedback on the AI’s responses to help it behave more helpfully — is rapidly gaining more attention.
The only way to successfully navigate a transformative technology like AI is to put people at the heart of the conversation. To borrow a phrase from AI development, this means putting the ‘human back in the loop’.
At SXSW we heard a fascinating assessment from Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatowski on the areas where AI has added the most value and conversely, where the company still benefits from a human touch in decision making such as responding to complex, priority customer service issues. OpenAI’s Matt Weaver discussed what AI actually means in software as a service (SaaS), bringing insights directly from the world’s leading AI company as we enter the era of AI agents.
And at London Tech Week, we heard from a panel of leaders including Funding Circle’s Lisa Jacobs and David Buttress of OVO on how they are proactively involving workforces into evolving plans around technology transformation and AI adoption in business processes and operations.
What’s emerging here is a more nuanced conversation – and one that presents some important choices for corporate affairs leaders. It’s been tempting to think that the hardest part of AI is implementation: pick a supplier, integrate the system, inform or train your team. Job done.
But at a time when governments globally have stepped back from AI regulation, assurance and safety, the impetus for businesses and organisations – whether that’s communications leads, legal teams or boards – to engage with critical decisions on design, ethics, trust and risk, have only grown.
These decisions – which ultimately lie with individual companies and organisations rather than with the AI labs – have critical implications for how AI tools and systems are received by customers and employees. It means confronting the hard questions and grappling with the practical realities of how AI will actually be used — before problems emerge — so that the approach can be clearly and confidently communicated to the outside world.
This should be seen as a positive: it gives us greater agency on how AI is used and the benefits it brings – and the opportunity to put humans at the centre. Here, we have choices.
Success will lie with those who make AI adoption an enduring mindset – a way of building relationships with the audiences that matter most – rather than as a one off, quick fix.