Episodi

  • You Can't Mandate Curiosity: How Informa Moves from AI Adoption to Enablement
    Oct 15 2026

    Logins and prompt counts tell you people have opened the tool. They don't tell you whether anyone's work has changed. In this episode, Andy Lambert, co-founder of AcademyAI, talks to Donna Lovitt-Edwards, Head of AI Fluency at Informa, about how a 15,000-person business is shifting from AI adoption to genuine enablement.

    Donna's starting point is simple: you can mandate access, but you can't mandate curiosity. Instead of pushing tools at people, Informa creates pull. Its learning labs start with a real bottleneck in someone's workflow rather than with AI, and attendees vote on which problems to solve. Everyone leaves with a new way of doing their own work, and some leave having learned that a problem isn't one AI can solve, which is fine too.

    Donna explains how she measures enablement by working with finance to put a value on time saved, including a sales team targeting a 3% lift in conversions that saw 2% within two months. She talks about the loud 5% who already love AI and the silent 95% she's really trying to reach, and why some of the strongest resistance has come from early careers colleagues worried about whether their skills will stay relevant and about AI's environmental impact. She also covers why human in the loop is a design decision rather than a slogan, how Informa's AI Innovation Council weighs risk against value before ideas reach production, and why she believes AI transformation should sit with HR rather than IT.

    Chapters
    00:00 Introduction and Informa at a glance
    01:47 From sales and L&D to Head of AI Fluency
    05:13 Shifting from adoption to enablement
    06:51 How to measure enablement
    09:02 Being a super connector
    10:48 Why you can't mandate curiosity
    13:00 The loud 5% and the silent 95%
    13:42 How Informa's learning labs work
    19:21 Understanding resistance
    20:39 The surprising sceptics: early careers colleagues
    24:07 Human in the loop as a design decision
    26:44 Prioritising ideas through the AI Innovation Council
    32:42 Colleague-built apps and the internal marketplace
    34:35 Commitment from the top
    37:12 Finding the right person to lead AI transformation
    38:01 Why AI should sit with HR
    39:34 Fail fast, learn quick, move on
    40:10 Where to find Donna

    Connect with Donna
    LinkedIn: Donna Lovitt-Edwards

    Learn more about AcademyAI: academyai.co

    #AITransformation #AIFluency #LearningAndDevelopment #FutureOfWork #AIAdoption

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    41 min
  • The AI Stair Step: How the NHS Is Moving from Copilot to Organisation-Wide Agents
    Oct 14 2026

    Most organisations have rolled out AI licences. Far fewer have got past meeting summaries. In this episode, Andy Lambert, co-founder of AcademyAI, talks to Rory Hill, Head of Corporate Transformation and AI at an NHS Trust, about how his team moves people from their first prompt to agents that work across the whole organisation.

    Rory walks through the stair step model that came out of his first Copilot pilot: prompting, saved prompts, personal agents, team agents, then organisation-wide agents. Training, governance and controls all hang off that one structure, which gives every part of the organisation a shared way to understand what has to be in place before a use case can scale.

    He also shares why staff who attended three to five sequenced training sessions used AI many times more than those who attended one, how his team reads digital maturity on two fronts (staff readiness and technical readiness) to turn "we can't build that" into "not yet", why reusable components like a shared mailbox agent shape prioritisation, and how the NHS measures return through time saved, staff experience and quality of work. He closes with a point for anyone in a similar role: the organisations that look slow now, because they are laying foundations, are likely to be the ones producing solutions with ease in a few years.

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    35 min
  • Shiny tool looking for a Problem, with Richard Geary
    Sep 29 2026

    Most organisations have bought AI. Fewer can say they are actually better at anything that matters.

    Andy Lambert (AcademyAI) talks with Richard Geary of Flow HQ about practical AI adoption: diagnose the real problem before you buy the shiny tool, train for adoption rather than checkbox tool skills, and close the gap between personal productivity wins and organisation-wide value.

    Richard has worked through the early SaaS wave (Salesforce, Oracle), helped build SeatGeek’s B2B business toward unicorn status, and has trained thousands of people on AI. His bar is clear: he is not training a tool. He is training for adoption, so people leave able to do something they could not before, and want to keep doing it.

    In this episode:

    • Why rolling out licences first creates a shiny tool looking for a problem
    • People → process → technology, in that order
    • Why Sally in accounts and Brian in the stores know what leadership misses
    • Enablement vs one-and-done certificates when models change weekly
    • AI as “the world’s most well-read intern” and critical review after every output
    • Personal Copilot wins vs measurable organisational ROI
    • A cabinet-maker proposal workflow cut from hours to about 40 minutes
    • What to say when someone tells you “we need to do AI”

    Start with why. Find the people who know how the work really breaks. Buy the shiny tool last.

    Guest: Richard Geary, Flow HQ Host: Andy Lambert, AcademyAI

    AcademyAI: https://academyai.co

    Andy's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyrlambert/

    Richard;'s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gearyrichard/

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    49 min
  • Why AI capability is so uneven, and how HR can close the gap, with Erica Farmer
    Sep 10 2026

    Most organisations have the AI tools. Far fewer are actually AI capable. That's exactly where individual productivity and enthusiasm fail to add up to real organisational value.

    Andy Lambert (co-founder AcademyAI) and @EricaFarmerai , Influential AI Skills Speaker and Author (Quantum Rise Talent Group) discuss why AI capability spreads so unevenly, across teams, seniority levels, and individuals.

    We get into what's really driving the gap, including the organisational design decisions sitting behind it, what HR and people teams are doing about it that works, and why proving capability matters more than assuming it, especially once a board or regulator asks for evidence rather than a training completion rate.

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    58 min
  • Everyone bought the tool. Nobody bought the outcome, with Dan Boyles, Hello AI Collective
    Sep 4 2026
    As part of this podcast, I want to bring you the real stories of what real business success looks like with AI. Not personal productivity hacks, but measurable business outcomes.So, that means chatting with those who are doing this day-to-day. And that meant my first call was to Dan Boyles.Dan runs Hello AI Collective, a year-old consultancy that works both sides of the table: vendors like Microsoft, Lenovo, Nvidia and Sage send him their clients to drive AI transformation, and he also works directly with brands like Monster Energy, Formula One teams and Premier League clubs. Before that, he spent eight years at Microsoft (two of them as one of only twelve Global Master Trainers). His entire job now is answering one question for businesses: is this actually making you money?It might be a simple question, but it’s finally starting to get a lot more scrutiny.56% of CEOs report no increase in revenue and no drop in costs from their AI spend in the last twelve months (Source: PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, 4,454 CEOs, January 2026).We’ve bought the tools expecting them to magically deliver business outcomes. But for the majority of businesses, this is not happening.For the first year that Dan’s team ran Copilot deployments, 80% of the projects failed. Whilst Copilot has its ‘quirks’, this wasn’t the tool that was at fault, it was the approach that was: Give everyone basic training and let them figure out the rest. This approach to training works for typical software products, where the same input always gives the same output. It doesn’t work for a tool where the result depends entirely on how well someone can think about the problem in front of them.His team rebuilt their whole model around three words: Reason, Solution, Scale. Before any tool gets switched on, they sit the leadership team down and ask why they’re doing this at all. “We need to be more competitive” isn’t a reason. “We’re at 8% EBITDA and need to hit 13% before an acquisition” is. Once there’s a real business reason and a clearly defined objective, they trace it down through every department until they find the specific, boring bottleneck that’s actually costing money.Where real organisation transformation happensOne client, a $1.2 billion turnover company, had a quoting process that took five hours per job because someone had to pull data from thirteen different places and shuttle a PDF between people. Dan’s team spent four and a half months rebuilding that one workflow. EBITDA moved from 8% to 9.3%. That’s $17 million in extra revenue, from a single process.A second client, a distribution business processing 8,000 invoices every fortnight across a team of 40 accountants, was bleeding money to late payment fees because invoice dates didn’t match what was logged in their system. Dan’s team built an agent to flag every mismatch automatically. £332,000 saved a month.Neither of those started with “let’s use AI.” Both started with someone sitting inside the business for weeks, mapping exactly where the time and money were actually going. The tool was the last five per cent of the job, not the first.The instinct with any new tool is to ask, “how do I use this to save money fastest?” But efficiency is table stakes now. The businesses that are seeing returns from AI are the ones that are re-thinking their processes (as with Dan’s examples above) and those that are using AI to achieve something that wasn’t possible before.Dan’s view is that the businesses that win are the ones using AI to make the customer experience itself unbeatable. Dan’s own accountant sends him a full call summary and quote within two minutes of hanging up. She’s more expensive than the next accountant he could find. He’s never once considered switching.How ‘uneven’ AI capability is a hidden drag on a businessAI capability inside a business is nowhere near evenly spread. Dan told me about one private equity client where a graduate had built custom automations for $500 a month, while someone else on the same floor didn’t know how to turn on dark mode. And it’s often the people who’ve been in a role for fifteen years, not the recent graduates, who spot the biggest opportunities, because they’re the ones who’ve lived with a bad process long enough to actually hate it.The traditional fix, classroom training and hackathons, gets you so far. What actually drives change is the opposite: Micro-learning tailored to a person’s role, along with freedom to experiment and a structured process of sharing workflows and best practices across an organisation. A training session is an event. Capability is a state, and most organisations are still only buying the first one.You can check out the full chat here:Hope you find the discussion useful,Andy
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    54 min