Niresh Rajah, Chief Data & AI Officer, Chair – UK AI for Financial Services, Fellow at Imperial College and Associate Fellow at Oxford University 

• Defining agentic AI: what distinguishes it from traditional and generative AI
• From chatbots and co-pilots to fully autonomous agents: the evolution of capability
• Strategic opportunities: customer service, sales automation, compliance, financial forecasting and personalisation at scale
• Risk landscape: where autonomous decision-making creates legal, operational and reputational liability
• Building the board-level business case: ROI frameworks and the metrics that matter

Sapan Dogra, Managing Director, Data & AI, Accenture 

THIS SESSION WILL BE HELD UNDER THE CHATHAM HOUSE RULE

• The competitive imperative: why UK businesses must act now or risk falling behind
• Current adoption rates and how the UK compares to the US, EU and China
• The productivity dividend: measurable gains from early adopters across key sectors
• The US-UK Tech Prosperity Deal: what the Anthropic, Nscale, OpenAI, Microsoft and NVIDIA investments unlock for British firms
• From pilot to production: setting the ambition for the day ahead

Moderator 

Niresh Rajah, Chief Data & AI Officer, Chair – UK AI for Financial Services, Fellow at Imperial College and Associate Fellow at Oxford University 

Panellists 

Emily Campbell-Ratcliffe, Director of AI Assurance, Frontier Economics

Ross D'Arcy, Head of Business Development, Banking - EMEA, NVIDIA

Andy Thornley, Head of Regulatory Affairs, Innovate Finance 

AI Disruption Use Case I – Banking, rewired for the age of AI, with a real-time agentic balance sheet

Project Atlas is on a mission to make banking instant and hyper-personal – customers should not have to wait days or weeks for generic, off-the shelf products. Delivering that requires re-wiring a bank from the inside out using frontier AI technology. A bank, in its simplest form, is a balance sheet, recycling deposits into loans. Today that work is done by slow, siloed, human committees meeting at best weekly, at worst annually. Our balance sheet agent, Aurora, collapses these processes into a single, continuous AI engine. Aurora is based on advanced deep reinforcement leaning enabling our bank to price deposits, allocate capital and underwrite loans continuously – so we can generate in real-time bespoke, hyper-personal products, at better prices, without taking on more risk

Nick Pedersen, Co-Founder and CEO, Project Atlas

AI Disruption Use Case II - Building the Consulting Firm of the Future

Consulting is being deeply transformed by AI. It is not an "if", it is a "how". A consulting firm's value lies in its methodology, its expertise and its accumulated IP, delivered by talented teams project by project. AI will not replace that value, but it will reshape how it is delivered. And the real transformation is collective, not individual: it is about automating full sub-parts of projects, which takes agentic architecture, not a chatbot per consultant. Cigno encodes a firm's own methodology, frameworks and corpus into governed multi-agent workflows, running on a model-agnostic, sovereign infrastructure. Consulting-grade deliverables, at senior-level quality, with full control of IP. Cigno has been co-designed with leading consulting firms, to work alongside their consultants.

Philippe Reynier, Co-Founder & CEO, Cigno AI

How is Agentic AI reshaping enterprise cybersecurity risk and what strategies are needed to secure and leverage the agentic enterprise?

Philip James, Head of UK Data, Privacy & Cyber Security and Co-Head, International Data Group, Browne Jacobson

• Governance frameworks for autonomous systems: accountability at board and executive level
• Human-in-the-loop design: when and how to maintain meaningful oversight
• Dynamic policy enforcement and real-time compliance monitoring in production
• Ethical guardrails: bias, fairness, transparency and explainability in agentic systems
• Data privacy in agentic workflows: managing sensitive data handled by AI agents
• Practical steps to audit-readiness: documentation, logging and explainability

Moderator

Tim McGarr MBA, Global Head of AI Market Development & Partnerships (Regulatory Services), The British Standards Institution

Panellists

Professor Lukasz Szpruch, School of Mathematics, University of Edinburg; Director of Finance and Economics Programme, The Alan Turing Institute

Karthik Srinivas, Enterprise AI Lead, Head of Data and AI Governance, MS Amlin

Helder Dias, Lawyer and Legal Consultant, CRIA Humana

Priyanka Nayyar, Co-Founder & Partner, Dailoqa

• Change management: building buy-in from board to front line
• Upskilling and reskilling: developing internal AI capability and literacy across the workforce
• Data and infrastructure readiness: what you need in place before deploying agents
• Integration challenges: connecting agentic AI to legacy systems and existing workflows
• Procurement and vendor selection: how to navigate the complex vendor landscape, assess third-party AI risks and what to look for in an agentic AI partner 
• Culture and trust: overcoming internal resistance to autonomous decision-making

Moderator 

Emma Joyce, Chief Revenue Officer and Head of EMEA, Global Blockchain Business Council 

Panellists

Ashutosh Pandey, VP Project Management, Quality and Process, Eutelsat Group

Jessica Ridella, Global Technology Managing Director, IBM UKI 

Graham Smith, Head of AI, Data Science & Innovation, NatWest Group

Who Supplies the Wisdom When AI Supplies the Answers?

• Why Agentic AI is fundamentally changing the environment in which organisational decisions are made
• The shift from expertise and knowledge as sources of advantage to judgement and wisdom as sources of advantage
• The hidden risks of automation bias, cognitive offloading and misplaced trust in AI-generated recommendations
• Why Human-in-the-Loop may no longer be a sufficient aspiration for leaders
• The evolution from Human-in-the-Loop to Wisdom-in-the-Loop
• Building cultures and capabilities that enable humans and intelligent agents to make better decisions together

Carl Hewitt, Partner, Davies

Addressing the acute skills shortages and cultural shifts required for successful agentic AI adoption

THIS SESSION WILL BE HELD UNDER THE CHATHAM HOUSE RULE

• Leveraging initiatives like the UK Government’s AI Skills Boost to upskill the workforce for the agentic era. Practical strategies for “digitizing skills at scale”
• How executive roles will evolve: the AI-augmented C-suite
• Decision-making in the age of autonomous systems: what remains distinctly human?
• The digital workforce of tomorrow: humans and agents working in tandem
• New job categories, skills and career paths created by agentic AI deployment
• Managing a blended workforce: performance, accountability and organisational culture
• Board-level AI governance: what directors and non-executives need to understand

Moderator  

Michael Smets, Professor, Said Business School, University of Oxford 

Panellists

Nida Naeem, AI Governance Board Member and Director of AI & Data Analytics at the UK National Audit Office, and Founding Partner at Omnicivic.uk AI Assurance and Advisory

Marina Antoniou, Global Markets Head of Market Abuse Risk Assessment, NatWest Markets & ICAEW Financial Services Faculty Board Member

Sonia Nash, Founder at NashMind Consulting Ltd, ex-Head of Business AI at SAP UK&I

• Identifying the right agentic AI use cases for your organisation: where to start
• Building the internal business case: engaging your board and securing investment
• Governance and risk frameworks to establish before you deploy
• Quick wins vs long-term transformation: a phased and pragmatic approach
• Measuring success: KPIs, ROI modelling and reporting to the board
• Resources and support: UK Government programmes, industry bodies and the ecosystem

Moderator

Niresh Rajah, Chief Data & AI Officer, Chair – UK AI for Financial Services, Fellow at Imperial College and Associate Fellow at Oxford University

Panellists

David Crelley, Head of Responsible AI and Data, Admiral Group Plc 

Clive Kelman, Advanced Data and AI Exploitation Lead, BAE Systems

Joe Welton, Head of UKI & Northern Europe, OpenAI 

A. Agentic AI in consulting – reinventing knowledge work  

• From individual to collective productivity: why giving every consultant a chatbot saves time, but only agentic workflows orchestrating tens of specialised agents actually transform the firm
• Encoding the firm's edge: turning proprietary methodology, frameworks and private corpus into governed, reproducible multi-agent workflows, and why this integrated stack is the real moat against increasingly capable LLMs
• Reinventing the talent model: from pyramid to diamond, the redefined junior role, and how firms grow senior judgment
• Trust, grounding and governance: keeping deliverables consulting-grade and preventing hallucinations through source verification and reviewer layers
• Data sovereignty as a competitive filter: Regulatory risk (e.g. CLOUD Act exposure), model-agnosticism, and why client RFPs increasingly include how AI is used as a key decision criterion
• The business model reset: erosion of the billable hour, the shift to fixed-fee and outcome-based pricing, and software-like margins for firms that productise their services

Moderator and Contributors

Philippe Reynier, CEO & Co-founder, Cigno

Tony Clark, Founder & CEO, NextWave

Jeff Tijssen, Co-founder, Brainfood; Senior Advisor, Bain & Company

Federica De Stefano, Associate Professor at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford 
 
B.  Building High-Performance Human + Agent Teams

• As organisations move from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide adoption teams and decision-making now need to be redesigned to realise value. The greatest differentiator is increasingly the organisation's ability to create effective partnerships between humans and AI agents.
• This session will explore what separates successful adopters from those struggling to scale impact, including:
• Defining the future team model: how work is divided between humans and AI agents, and where human judgement creates the greatest value.
• The capabilities that matter most: critical thinking, judgement, orchestration, oversight and the ability to work effectively alongside AI.
• Trust, adoption and behaviour change: overcoming resistance, building confidence and creating the cultural conditions for responsible AI use.
• Performance in hybrid teams: measuring productivity, quality, innovation and contribution when outcomes are delivered by both people and AI.
• Leadership and operating model implications: how organisations evolve management practices, accountability and skills development for a human + agent workforce.
• The discussion will consider practical lessons from organisations implementing agentic AI and examine what it takes to build teams that are more productive, adaptable and resilient.

Moderator

Paul Butler, Partner, Davies 

Contributors

Paul O’Brein, Group Chief AI Officer and CTO - Global Solutions, Davies 

Manal Koujan, Global Technology Manager, Deutsche Bank

Toby Weston, Developer Advocate and Chief Engineer IB, Deutsche Bank

C.  AI Governance – building out responsible AI frameworks, that also align to evolving AI regulation

This session will explore how organisations can put responsible AI principles into practice and embed responsible AI into everyday decision-making, creating governance that protects people, satisfies regulatory expectations and gives the organisation confidence to innovate responsibly.

• Responsible AI is about ensuring that AI is designed, deployed and used in ways that are fair, safe, transparent and accountable and that protect customers, employees and wider society from harm.
• AI governance provides the structures, ownership, and controls by which that can be achieved.
• This needs to be considered within the context of a UK principles-led and regulator-led environment. Existing requirements concerning data protection, consumer outcomes, operational resilience, accountability, and discrimination already apply to many uses of AI, while UK policy and international regulation continue to develop.
• Organisations must therefore build frameworks that can respond to regulatory change without becoming a narrow compliance exercise.
• Questions to be covered include: 
• The link between AI governance and responsible AI
• The foundations of responsible AI in any organisation
• How to tailor a responsible AI for your organisation
• How should organisations define fairness, transparency and appropriate human oversight in their own context?
• How can they demonstrate that their controls are operating effectively, rather than simply documenting that policies exist?

The discussion will consider the foundations of an effective responsible AI framework

Moderator and Contributors

Buki Obayiuwana, Head of AI, Change and Transformation Consulting, Crowe UK

Dr David Crelley, Head of Responsible AI and Data, Admiral Group Plc 

Jason Tassell, Data & Analytics Consulting, Crowe UK 

Danyel Ul-Haq, Senior Consultant, AI Adoption, Crowe UK 

Niresh Rajah, Chief Data & AI Officer, Chair – UK AI for Financial Services, Fellow at Imperial College and Associate Fellow at Oxford University