New for 2026 – The AI Leadership Lab – 9th March
AI is no longer a passing trend – it’s shaping the future of technology and leadership. Whether you’re sceptical of the hype or convinced it’s essential to your strategy, one thing is clear: avoiding the conversation isn’t an option.
This half-day, highly interactive add-on will create space for the conversations engineering leaders must be having about AI today.
Whether you’re taking baby steps or bold leaps, AI is already here. This is your chance to explore it with fellow leaders in a space that’s honest, practical, and forward-looking.
Spaces are strictly limited – secure your place early.
9th March – Here’s a look at what we’ve got planned…
13:00
Registration
13:30
From Rollout to Results: Unlocking Business Impact from AI-Augmented Engineering
Generative AI tools are changing how software is built, but rolling out coding assistants does not guarantee results. Many organisations see high adoption without any real improvement in engineering productivity, performance or ROI.
What you’ll learn:
- How to link the adoption of AI coding tools to engineering impact by exploring five key areas seen in pioneering organisations: rollout, approach, constraints management, engineering impact, and ROI.
- How to identify the constraints that are limiting value in your organisation, and how these constraints affect productivity and outcomes.
- How to share lessons across teams and build a systematic approach to capturing real business value from AI-augmented engineering.
- A simple plan you can take away for tracking progress, communicating results, and setting your organisation up for long-term success with AI engineering tools.
Craig Smiley, CPTO, PlandekAdvanced Prompting: How To Put AI To Work
Most people use AI poorly, producing “work slop” that looks professional but advances nothing. This 90-minute workshop teaches CTOs and engineering leaders the systematic techniques that transform AI from a frustrating chatbot into a genuinely useful work tool.
What you’ll learn:
- The power of questions – The single phrase that turns AI into a strategic thinking partner, not just a search engine
- Meta-prompting – How to get AI to write better prompts than you would write yourself, creating reusable templates for your team
- The prompt cycle – When to refine, when to throw away, and how to build 1% better prompts daily for compound gains
- Making it repeatable – Using custom GPTs, Claude projects, and Gemini gems to share systematic approaches across your organisation
*Please bring your laptop and your AI tool of choice (ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini)* as we’ll be trying lots of different techniques together live in the workshop. No paid subscription to any of these tools are needed to get the benefits.
Chris Parsons, Independent Consultant
15:00
Networking Break
15:30
The CTO’s AI Playbook: From Board Pressure to Business Impact
AI is not a productivity tool, it’s an organisational X-ray. It reveals and amplifies the problems you already have. This workshop equips CTOs to build real organisational capability and communicate AI impact at the executive and board level. The core framework we’ll be working with are the 7 capabilities that separate the successful 6% adopters from the 94% who are missing out on AI’s biggest gains.
What you’ll learn:
- How to reframe AI from a tools conversation to a capability conversation by understanding the four dimensions of AI maturity
- How to navigate the people transformation that AI creates and how to setup cross-functional AI Guilds.
- The new security and compliance challenges AI brings to the table.
- A framework you can take away for building organisational AI capability, having strategic conversations with stakeholders at every level, and positioning your engineering function for what’s coming next.
*Please bring your laptop to this session.
Khalil Dimachkie, CTO, Blue Light Card
18x: What Happens When AI Writes, Reads, and Reviews All the Code
At Mindstone, we dissolved the boundaries between engineering, product, and design. In three months, we shipped 400,000 lines and now we’re trying to figure out how our product process needs to change to keep up.
Examine the playbook for going all-in on AI-native engineering, including product workflow shifts and the tradeoffs you can’t avoid. You’ll leave with practical techniques and a set of hard questions to take back to your team. Also, explore questions we don’t have answers to yet, because when the laws of physics change, the old playbook stops fitting.
What you’ll learn:
- How multi-model, multi-stage orchestration replaces traditional development workflows
- Fix the factory not the output, and how our job as engineers has changed
- How to deal with cognitive debt, and writing documentation for AI rather than humans
- Updating Kanban when we each juggle a half-dozen balls at once
- Roles in a merged product-engineering team when everyone commits code
Greg Detre, CTO, Mindstone
17:00
The Open Session
No slides. No set speakers. Just honest conversations.
In this fully interactive session, you and your peers decide what to discuss – from AI adoption and scaling teams to leadership challenges and culture change.
Pitch a topic, grab a group, and dive into the real issues shaping modern technology leadership.
18:00
AI Leadership Dinner: Continuing the Conversation
Join Plandek for this private dinner, bringing together senior technology leaders for open, thoughtful discussion on where GenAI is genuinely improving delivery, where impact has been harder to achieve, and how underlying system constraints continue to shape outcomes.
For those joining from AI Leadership Lab, it continues the conversation; for others, it’s an opportunity to step into it in an intimate, candid setting, offering a relaxed setting for experienced leaders to compare perspectives over a carefully curated menu.
*You must have a ticket to the AI Leadership Lab and/or CTO Craft Con: London to attend.
18:00
18:30
CTO Craft Netwalk led by Cloudflare
Start the conference on the move. Join a guided walk with fellow attendees – a chance to stretch your legs, enjoy the city, and connect in a relaxed, informal setting before things get underway.
Pre-Event Mixer
We understand that walking into a conference can be daunting, so our pre-event mixer is designed to help you make connections ahead of the event.
Hosted by Cloudflare at County Hall in Southbank, join us for a drink, meet your peers, and build your network before the conference even begins.
Sponsors
