Your CIO Shouldn't Own AI

Handing the AI programme to the CIO is the obvious move, and Stephen Redmond thinks it is the wrong one. AI is more than a technology rollout. It changes decision rights, it crosses every function from supply chain to sales, and it does not give the same answer twice, none of which sits comfortably inside IT.Stephen founded Straitéis AI and has written two books on AI leadership. He makes the case for a Chief AI Officer reporting to the CEO, and explains why a fractional appointment often beats a permanent hire.We get into what that person should tackle first, the three skills the job needs, why the chief data officer matters more once your own documents are in play, and what paving a cow path has to do with any of it.Stephen is only the second guest this show has had back.SHOW NOTES:About StephenStephen on LinkedInHis books: Both titlesAI Bowling Bumpers, on governance, was still in final edit at recordingWhy giving AI to the technology lead is the natural mistakeThe three reasons AI does not belong in ITWhat a chief data officer actually does · The case for a chief AI officer ·Why fractional often beats a permanent hireThe first task is working out what the tasks arePaving a cow path · Why the outsider often sees it betterThe three skills a fractional AI leader needsHow the roles sit togetherThree books in under a yearThe EU AI Act, and why enforcement is not only a big-company problemResearch cite: BCG AI Radar 2026Regulation : EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689Transparency obligations discussed are Article 50, in effect since 2 August 2026Webinar, Thursday 17 September, lunchtime, 45 min : RegisterAI Institute Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What actually happens when your team uses AI to write a blog post, a tender or a report, and does the law now care? Alan Thornton, founder of the AI governance platform Tipcan Solutions, joins Maryrose Lyons to make the EU AI Act genuinely usable for built environment professionals.Alan walks us through the the latest requirement in EU AI Act compliance that is labelling. If you're using AI and sharing certain types of text content now you must label it, but not all content. A general design blog is fine. A glowing piece about a local councillor is not, unless a named human takes responsibility for it. That idea, that every firm must have real accountability runs through the whole conversation.From there: shadow AI and where the risk really hides, how to properly inventory your AI use cases, and the fines that now apply, including a sneaky second one for handing a regulator incomplete information in a panic. Alan and Maryrose also get into what 'high risk' means once CE marks and national sandboxes enter the picture, and why Ireland's oddly fragmented approach to enforcement is worth watching.Practical, occasionally very funny, and refreshingly free of scaremongering.Show notes:Shadow AI, and why the biggest risk is often the staff member you least suspectThe four risk levels, and why most firms sit in the "limited risk" transparency bandThe public-interest test: one blog post needs an AI label, a near-identical one does notThe release valve, how genuine human oversight makes the labelling duty easeHow to properly inventory your AI use cases, and why a spreadsheet will not cut itThe fines that now apply, including a second, sneakier one for panicking under pressureWhat "high risk" really means, once CE marks and national sandboxes enter the pictureWhy Ireland's fragmented approach to enforcement is worth watchingThe one thing every firm can do this week to get on the right side of the ActAlan Thornton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-thornton/Tipcan SolutionsEU AI Act · Article 50, transparency · Article 99, penaltiesISO/IEC 42001 (AI management systems)CE marking (EU)RICS AI standard (in force 9 March 2026)UK Data (Use and Access) Act 2025Ireland's EU AI Act implementationWe are AI InstituteJoin us o 17 September for a webinar on: The EU AI Act, your staff, your risk: ignorance is no defenseRegister now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andreessen Horowitz has a thesis that every building is still designed by software from the 1990s. Niklas Lindgren agrees, and he is building the company to change it. His claim is blunt: AI is about to change how 70 to 80% of the hours on an engineering project get done.Niklas is the founder and CEO of Endra, a Stockholm-based AI platform built specifically for mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) engineers. While we don't normally have vendors on the podcast, we made an exception in this case because Endra looks like the Revit killer everyone's been waiting for after all these years. Andreessen Horowitz certainly seems to think so, having invested in the Swedish based AI start up. In this episode, Niklas walks Maryrose through why MEP has been so slow to change, why jobs are not disappearing even as the work transforms, how firms can build entirely new services on the back of AI, and why outsourced teams are the most exposed. He closes with the one practical step every engineering firm should take this week.A sharp, grounded conversation about the AI rebuild of the built environment, from someone doing it inside the largest firms in the industry.In this episodeWhy MEP engineering has barely changed since the 1990s, and the three layers of complexity that kept it stuckWhy Autodesk is a partner, not a competitorWhat Endra has learned from working with world-class engineering teamsWhy AI will change 70 to 80% of project hours, and why jobs are going nowhereThe new products and pricing firms can build on the back of AIWhy outsourced, commoditised work is the most exposedThe one practical step every engineering firm should take this weekWhy this is a people game that takes real time, not a quick pilotLinksEndra WebsiteNiklas Lindgren on LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Karen Lewis Enright is a change management professional with over 20 years of transformation experience across global organisations including Johnson & Johnson and Wipro. She holds a Masters in organisational psychology, but what makes her stand out is two decades spent helping leaders turn strategy into meaningful change. She specialises in AI strategy and is the first change management professional to join ChattingGPT.In this conversation, Maryrose and Karen get into the human side of AI adoption: how to lead when you're uncertain yourself, using the image of a slipping cup of coffee to explain where people's attention goes under stress, why the sceptics belong in the room alongside the enthusiasts, and how to build trust by being honest with people about what AI changes in how they work. Karen tells the story of a self-parking car that never gets used, a miniature version of every stalled AI rollout, and makes the case for celebrating the curious champions most organisations try to shut down.She talks through the change management tools she reaches for, from change agent networks on-site to reverse mentoring between graduate engineers and senior partners, to knowing when to pause a BIM rollout or a new tender process and let a stretched team catch up. She closes on the advice she keeps returning to: start with the why, and get the data, the governance and the change management right before you scale the technology across the practice.Connect with Karen Lewis Enright on LinkedIn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most of the AI conversation is a numbers game: licences bought, people "using AI", whether the firm has a strategy yet. James Garner thinks that is the wrong number to watch. The money is flowing and the strategies are written, but the thing almost no one is funding is capability — whether ordinary professionals can actually use the tools well. That gap, he argues, is widening, and it is where the real risk now sits.James is Head of AI at Gleeds, a Fellow of RICS, and co-founder of the Project Flux podcast. He has been a quantity surveyor since 1998, a profession he jokes you could pull someone into from 1890, give a day's training, and they would manage fine today — which is exactly what makes this moment different. He sat on the RICS working group behind its new responsible-AI standard, in force since March, which for the first time makes baseline AI literacy a requirement for every chartered surveyor, not a nice-to-have.James walks Maryrose through why an "AI strategy" that is not a business strategy powered by AI will fail, the difference between transparency and explainability (and why he prefers "bookending" to "human in the loop"), the model-cost reckoning coming for anyone on a flat monthly plan, and the eight Claude files every professional should set up to get real value from Claude Code. Along the way, the habit that keeps him ahead: half an hour, every Friday, to do nothing but experiment.A practical, clear-eyed and genuinely useful conversation about closing the gap between owning AI and actually using it, before it widens any further.James Linkdln Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most of the AI conversation is fixated on AGI: when machines will match human intelligence, and which lab gets there first. Dr. Craig Kaplan thinks that is the wrong thing to watch. The real story is what comes seconds later artificial super intelligence, systems a thousand times, or even a trillion times, smarter than the smartest human alive. And he believes it is arriving faster than almost anyone is prepared for.Craig has been working on this since the 1980s. He earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon alongside Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, one of the scientists who named the field of AI, and he has spent decades building collective intelligence systems — including ones that traded billions of dollars on Wall Street and beat the best hedge funds. That track record is the foundation of his core argument in this episode: the widely held belief that safer AI must mean slower AI is simply wrong. You do not need to slow down, he says. You need a smarter design.That design is a democratic "society" of cooperating AI agents — millions of them, each carrying the values of a separate human checking one another in the open, rather than a single monolithic black box no one can see inside. Craig walks Maryrose through why this is both more powerful and far safer, what Pope Leo's first encyclical gets right and wrong about treating AI as a mere tool, and why the values we hand these systems now, in their "childhood," will shape everything that follows. He also makes the case for sovereign AI and the Global South, where cultures like Nigeria's Yoruba risk being erased by models trained overwhelmingly on Western data. And the pace is staggering: some AI capabilities, he notes, are now doubling in as little as 1.3 months.A sharp, grounded, and surprisingly optimistic conversation about getting the most important technology in human history right before it arrives.Find Craig's white papers and free designs at superintelligence.comHere's you can see Craig's Linkdln Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In January 2026, Google was granted a patent that lets it read your website, break it into components, and serve searchers an AI-generated page assembled from your content. Visitors may never see your actual site. Joe Toscano — former Google designer, one of the voices in The Social Dilemma, and founder of Service Stories — saw this coming. Joe left Silicon Valley in 2017, before Cambridge Analytica broke, because of what he was being asked to build. He now runs Service Stories, which helps small and mid-size service businesses get found by AI search engines by converting their existing work orders and job data into content — automatically. Early results from their pilots show direct web traffic growth of 228% within 90 days, and over 400% across longer periods. The shift that makes this possible: search is moving from "plumber near me" to "why is my HVAC system creating complications in my house?" Topical authority — specific, question-answering content — is now the edge, and AI makes it viable to produce at scale for the first time. He also just returned from two months in China — and his account of robots delivering room service in three minutes, seamless phone-based identity and payments, and a level of operational fluency the West hasn't reached yet is genuinely uncomfortable for anyone who assumes Europe's regulatory caution is the only sensible posture. A sharp, grounded episode on where search is going, what China is building, and what AGI actually looks like when it arrives. Find Joe and a step-by-step guide to doing this yourself at servicestories.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Simon Hodgkins has spent a career running global marketing — Sage, CMO Club president, and now Chief Marketing Officer at Vistatec, the Dublin firm helping iconic brands scale content and AI worldwide. He joins Maryrose to argue that the real AI bottleneck isn't the models. It's whether a company is ready to use them.Simon makes the case for gap analysis before tooling: before you buy, pilot or deploy, you need to know how you actually work today — what content exists, which workflows are documented, how the Frankfurt office differs from New York, and what ISO 42001 would expect you to prove. He explains why bolting AI onto broken processes wastes money, why regulated industries still need human experts in the loop, and what an "intelligent workflow" actually looks like.On the hype cycle, Simon is blunt: stop headline-reading. Figure out what you're doing first. Or as Rory Sutherland puts it — no robots are buying new cars.A conversation for any leader whose pilots keep going nowhere. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The CSO stopped tracking the price of a pint of Guinness in Ireland in 2011. The last official figure was €3.93. Nobody picked it up again until Matt Cortland and John Fleming decided to call every pub in the country and ask. Using Google Maps for contact data, 11 Labs to clone a Northern Irish voice, Claude Code to orchestrate the whole system, and Twilio to actually make the calls, they built the Guinndex: a real-time index of pint prices across Ireland and Northern Ireland. Over 700 pubs called. Total cost: approximately €200. They didn't stop there. With fuel prices dominating headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, they applied the same methodology to US gas stations, creating the Gas Index, complete with AI agents named after King of the Hill characters and a feature that tells you whether the cheaper station is actually worth the drive. This episode is a masterclass in what's possible when you connect off-the-shelf AI tools with a problem worth solving. And a cautionary tale about the Irish goodbye. Find Matt and John at guindex.ai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sean Blanchfield, Co-Founder Jentic, joins Maryrose Lyons of the AI Institute for the second part of their conversation, this time diving deep into agentic AI, what it actually means for businesses, and how Jentic's infrastructure can help enterprise get there. From the risks of locking into a single AI model to a practical three-layer roadmap for AI transformation, Sean offers a grounded, builder's perspective on where enterprise AI is really headed. An essential listen for anyone in construction, professional services, or other sectors navigating fragmented systems and wondering where to start.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Welcome Back00:30 Model Neutrality — Why You Shouldn't Lock Into One AI01:30 Microsoft Copilot: The Hype and the Reality02:20 Self-Hosting and On-Prem AI for Sensitive Data03:00 Where Jentic Fits In — Mapping Your Software Ecosystem04:00 Building a Digital Twin of Your Business Infrastructure 05:00 Agents in the Sandbox — Testing Before Going Live05:45 Validating and Publishing Automations Incrementally06:30 Voice Agents and Real-Time Field Queries 07:30 Layer Three: Governance and Running an AI-Powered Company08:30 Humans in the Loop — Cross-Workflow Thinking09:15 Resistance to AI Adoption (Spoiler: Less Than You'd Think)10:00 The Future Company — Humans as Governors of Machines11:00 Wrap-Up and Where to Find JenticConnect with Sean Blanchfield : https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanblanchfield/Check out Jentic https://jentic.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.