From AI Survey to Production: What the Readiness Gap Actually Looks Like

Everyone talks about AI transformation. Almost no one talks about what happens when you survey your workforce and discover that executives and employees have completely different ideas about what AI readiness means - or when your pilot succeeds technically but stumbles in implementation.

This talk walks through a real organisational AI adoption journey end to end: designing and running an employee AI-readiness survey to surface use cases, identify champions and resistance; assessing infrastructure readiness against ambition; mapping the gap between executive strategy and frontline reality; and building an implementation roadmap grounded in what the organisation could actually absorb - not just what looked good on a slide.

We’ll cover how use cases were prioritised against both business objectives and genuine readiness, how a pilot was developed and what it took to move it into production, and, critically, where things went wrong along the way. The failures weren’t in the AI solution itself but in the human and organisational layers around it, which is exactly where most enterprise AI initiatives quietly die. Whether you’re beginning your AI adoption journey or leading initiatives beyond the proof-of-concept stage, this talk is a field report from the other side - showing what worked, what didn’t, and how to catch the gaps before they scale.