Most organisations are still getting AI adoption wrong, offering their people either reassurance without accountability, or accountability without reassurance. The Access Group did both at once, and a year on, the results speak for themselves.

Kate Hassler, Group Director of Brand & Comms at The Access Group, takes you inside what a genuinely embedded AI operating model looks like, not in theory, but in practice. She'll share direct examples of how her team uses AI day to day, how The Access Group brought shadow AI out of the shadows and into a governed, enterprise-wide programme, and why pairing empathy with non-negotiable expectation is what made the culture shift stick. She'll also show how baking brand guardrails directly into AI tools, rather than policing outputs after the fact, transformed the consistency and pace of everything the marketing team produces.

She'll also challenge one of the most dangerous assumptions in B2B marketing right now: that cutting junior headcount is a rational response to AI capability.   The organisations quietly hollowing out their entry-level pipelines today are the ones who will be scrambling for senior AI-fluent talent in 2030 and paying for that short-termism accordingly. Today's juniors are AI natives. You need a human at the start and end of every piece of work, and the apprenticeship pipeline that builds those humans does not pause for a technology cycle.

If your team still treats AI as a separate initiative with a beginning, middle and end, this session shows you what it looks like when it becomes the route you commit to.
 

What will the audience learn?

• How to build a genuinely embedded, enterprise-wide AI operating model
• How to bring shadow AI out of the shadows and into governed practice
• Why pairing empathy with non-negotiable expectation is what makes culture change stick
• How to bake brand guardrails into AI tools rather than policing outputs after the fact
• Why cutting junior headcount now could cost you senior AI-fluent talent later