So, your company is doing an ‘AI transformation’ - lessons from the coal face

Wednesday 7th October 2026, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Kate Gray

Venue: Skyscanner Limited, Quartermile One, 15 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9EN
(Please use Lauriston Place entrance. Note that Skyscanner will require you to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) for entry to their offices. Please read the terms here).

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm..

This talk will be preceeded by the Edinburgh Branch Annual General Meeting at 18:15.

This event is free of charge and open to all, though registration is required - you may not get past venue security if you do not register in advance.

Registration link coming soon.

Synopsis

Legacy tech continues to impact businesses today. With each year that passes, the pressure (and cost) grows to deal with the constraints and risks associated with keeping the ‘heritage’ systems operating.

After 11 years of working with organisations through the ‘delicious ambiguity’* of their transformations, the thrill of the shiny and new continues to numb awareness of the investment and effort required to support the people who are core to a successful outcome.

In this talk we’ll review lessons learned from different large-scale transformations that led, over the years, to costly pivots, restarts and time-consuming efforts to win back the trust and belief of the people (no shaming here, these will be anonymised because learning from mistakes is to be celebrated).

Yes, AI plays an important role, and this talk will include a review of how AI is driving changes in op models and ways of working that organisations need to think about today.

But, in the end, technology needs people.

*with thanks to Gilda Radner for this brilliant observation about life

About the speaker

Kate’s experiences include investing and working with technology start-ups and scale-ups, and board-level roles / consulting gigs in business strategy, product management, and enterprise ‘transformations’ at technology, finance, media, healthcare, travel, sports, and beverages organisations. Paying back the leaders who influenced her career, she mentors work colleagues, start-up and scale-up founders and their teams, and women who work in technology. She also has a passion for the potential of AI having spent 2 years studying computational models, which included coding a reinforcement learning model (this was also to avoid being fooled by consultant-speak about AI).