"95% of businesses admit their AI pilots are failing to deliver measurable impact."

Five Talking Points for the Morning

95% of AI pilots fail. The biggest challenge isn't starting, it's scaling. How do you build the business case, prove the value, and design for production from day one? We start with the question most leaders are afraid to ask.

AI exposes every broken workflow. 70% of leaders cite data quality and process readiness as the main blocker to scaling. Are you cleaning your house before you automate it, or just making the chaos faster?

The fastest ROI isn't in chasing revenue, it's in attacking your cost base. Are you focused on the unglamorous but high-impact work of automating core finance and operational processes? This is an enterprise sport.

The shift from human-in-the-loop 'copilots' to autonomous 'agents' is happening now. The real opportunity is using AI to act independently within your workflows – not just assist with tasks.

The market is flooded with vendors. Is your culture ready to measure and value 'time' as your most critical ROI metric, and are you ready to replace personal authority with protocol-driven trust to get it?

Who should attend

Leadership Series events are free, but attendance is by invitation or application only

This event is for senior leaders in Operations, Finance, and Transformation from the UK scale-up and mid-market community.

Leaders under pressure to move from AI intent to real deployment and honest enough to admit they need a plan.

Those responsible for making AI work operationally for their business, not just theoretically.

Anyone navigating the real-world constraints of legacy systems, data quality, and proving ROI, regardless of where they are on the journey.

A gathering of senior operations and finance leaders at efficiencyLIVE

What Our Research Found and Why It Matters

Over the past three months, aibl has tracked over 500 UK mid-market companies across 28 sectors. Of those, 72% showed public signals of AI adoption activity, from pilot projects and vendor partnerships to full production deployments. While the market is buzzing with AI, our data shows that the Finance & Operations pillar is seeing huge investment, but the value is not yet being realised, representing a dangerous 'profitless prosperity' gap. We are seeing a surge in back-office automation projects and a focus on process mining, yet most are struggling to connect these activities to a clear, measurable ROI. Yet 77% of businesses admit they have seen no change in revenue since adopting AI. This forum is built to close that gap.

A morning built around proof, honesty and trust

June 3, 2026