AI |
Strategy & Practice
SAFE INTELLIGENCE PRESENTS
21 October 2026. - Ham Yard, London
AI Strategy & Practice Conference
From AI agent plans to production reality
A day for engineering, business and compliance leaders to work through the realities of putting AI into productive use.
Hear from practitioners bringing AI into use in complex organisations. Real deployments, honest lessons and the decisions behind them.
OCT 21
LONDON
Speakers
Meet the practitioners joining us to discuss building, deploying and governing AI.
Richard Masters
Former VP Data & AI, Virgin Atlantic;
Head of AI Strategy, Ankura – AI by Design
Richard is the former Vice President of Data & AI at Virgin Atlantic, where he led the airline’s data transformation and AI strategy, driving the adoption of AI across customer experience, operations and commercial functions. His work focused on building enterprise AI capabilities and translating emerging technologies into practical business value. Richard has recently joined Ankura – AI by Design to lead AI strategy, bringing his experience of delivering AI transformation at Virgin Atlantic to organisations across industries through an ecosystem of technology partners.
Mira Pijselman
Managing Director & AI Governance Engineering Solution Leader, Ankura
Mira is a Managing Director at Ankura, where she assists organizations in optimizing the user experience of AI governance to be more intuitive to navigate and efficient to operate, while also providing an effective control foundation for advanced AI. Her work bridges human-centered design, systems thinking, and AI metrology (the science of how we measure AI performance, safety, compliance, adoption and value) to transition AI governance from static documentation to embedded operating intelligence. Prior to joining Ankura, Mira was Head of Responsible AI for a top global bank, where she founded and led the bank’s first responsible AI function. Mira holds an MSc from the University of Oxford, where she specialised in digital ethics.
Stuart McMeechan
EMEA Applied AI Engineering Leader, OpenAI
Stuart leads the Applied AI Engineering team at OpenAI for the EMEA region, helping organisations move from early-stage AI ideas to production-grade solutions. Before joining OpenAI, Stuart held senior roles in Professional Services, implementing large-scale solutions for clients involving techniques including graph, machine learning and LLMs, across domains such as supply chain and financial crime.
Huma Lodhi
Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Sky
Huma is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Sky, with more than 20 years of experience in AI and machine learning across industry and academia. Her work focuses on the responsible use of AI and Generative AI in product development. She holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of London.
Jovita Tam
Business Strategy & Execution Operator
Jovita is a business-focused data and AI advisor, engineer and dual-qualified attorney in England and Wales and New York. She works at the intersection of innovation and governance, helping leaders align commercial objectives, technical systems and regulatory requirements to turn data and AI capabilities into measurable enterprise value. Jovita has led complex transformation initiatives across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, working with organisations ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies. Her approach combines strategic, technical and legal expertise to help teams innovate responsibly, navigate regulatory complexity and move from ambition to practical execution.
Phoenix Williams
Responsible AI Specialist, Lloyds Banking Group
Phoenix is a Responsible AI Specialist at Lloyds Banking Group, focused on putting responsible AI into practice. His expertise spans adversarial robustness, fairness and bias evaluation, with experience applying responsible AI approaches in healthcare and life sciences. He holds a PhD from the University of Exeter, where his research explored the robustness of computer vision models through adversarial testing. His work has been published at leading AI conferences, including CVPR and NeurIPS, and in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.
Richard Sargeant
Founder of Agentometry;
AI Advisor at BCG
Richard works at the intersection of AI, organisational change and society. He is a Senior Advisor to Boston Consulting Group, following five years as a Managing Director and Partner leading AI transformation work, and has founded Agentometry, which helps organisations independently manage the performance of AI agents. Previously, Richard was Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Faculty, Director of Digital and Data Transformation at the Home Office, and a founding director of the UK Government Digital Service. His experience spans putting AI to work across industry and the public sector, alongside helping organisations navigate the operational and societal changes it creates.
Dr Amr Ellabban
Head of AI, Hg
Amr is Head of AI at Hg, where he works with portfolio company leadership teams to turn data and AI into practical business value. He combines deep technical expertise with strategy and delivery, helping businesses build AI capabilities and apply them across products and operations. Before joining Hg in 2017, Amr worked in Boston Consulting Group’s advanced analytics team, supporting clients across financial services, retail and industry. He previously held roles at OC&C Strategy Consultants and VisualDNA, where he was Lead Data Scientist. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, where his research focused on computer vision and machine learning.
Sebastian Jory
Founder, Lynott Partners;
Co-Founder, Primer
Sebastian is the founder of investment firm Lynott Partners and co-founder of Primer, an AI platform for investment research. His work brings together investment expertise and AI to help analysts process company information, identify emerging patterns and develop investment ideas. Before founding Lynott Partners in 2023, Sebastian launched and managed UK equity long/short strategies at Tellworth Investments. He previously led Strategy & Stock Selection at Liberum, where his team developed proprietary models to support portfolio managers. His background spans portfolio management, quantitative analysis and the practical application of technology to investment research.
Mark Leisten
VP Solutions Engineer, Bank of America
Mark is a Vice President and Solutions Engineer at Bank of America, specialising in conversational AI. His work focuses on developing AI chatbots for practical business use, addressing the design and implementation challenges involved in making conversational systems effective. Mark's background spans natural language processing, speech technology and solutions engineering. He has shared practical lessons on chatbot development, working with stakeholders and improving systems through iteration, with a focus on delivering business benefits. He studied at the University of Edinburgh.
Alexander Vakhitov
Senior Director of Perception and AI, Slamcore
Alexander is a computer vision and AI specialist at Slamcore, working on mapping and localisation for robotics. His experience spans 3D perception, generative AI and photorealistic human avatars, including previous work at Samsung AI Centre. He has co-founded two technology startups and holds a PhD in Mathematics from Saint Petersburg State University.
Oxana Samko
Responsible AI Lead, Management and Strategy, HSBC
Oxana is Responsible AI Lead within AI Management and Strategy at HSBC, bringing together technical AI delivery and practical governance. Her experience spans enterprise machine learning, synthetic data and technologies that protect privacy, with a focus on putting AI into use responsibly. Oxana previously led innovation research and HSBC’s internal data science consultancy. She has contributed to the FCA’s Synthetic Data Expert Group and research with the Alan Turing Institute on the trustworthy adoption of large language models in finance. She holds a PhD from Cardiff University, where her research focused on machine learning and time-series analysis.
Rafael Pierre
Lead AI Engineer, Citi
Rafael is Lead AI Engineer at Citi, specialising in building, evaluating and operating AI agents in production. He leads the development of Pegasus, a platform for AI evaluation and observability, helping teams understand agent behaviour, identify failures and measure improvements. Rafael brings more than 17 years’ experience across software engineering, cloud computing, data and AI, with previous roles at Hugging Face, Databricks, ING and ABN AMRO. He also teaches engineers how to build and deploy agentic applications, bringing a practical perspective on the reliability, scalability and operational demands of enterprise AI.
Luke Vilain
Director, AI Trust (AI Governance and Responsible AI), PwC
Luke is a Director in PwC’s AI Trust team, helping organisations put the governance, controls and assurance in place to deploy AI with confidence. He has more than 20 years of delivery experience, predominantly in financial services. His background spans AI governance and data ethics at UBS and Lloyds Banking Group, alongside governance and delivery methodologies at Accenture. His work focuses on making responsible AI practical through processes and reusable tooling that support fairness, explainability and effective oversight.
Samuel Colvin
Founder, Pydantic
Samuel is the founder and CEO of Pydantic and the creator of its widely used open-source Python data validation library. He leads the team behind Pydantic AI and Logfire, building tools that help developers create, evaluate, and monitor AI applications. Pydantic now helps organisations worldwide build and maintain modern AI-based IT infrastructure. A Python and Rust developer with more than a decade of software engineering experience. His work spans the foundations of modern Python development and the infrastructure needed to run AI agents reliably in production, with a focus on developer experience, observability and robust software engineering.
Jon Hammant
CEO, Orbital
Jon is CEO of Orbital, helping organisations connect enterprise systems and data so AI agents can operate reliably across their business. His background combines hands-on engineering with leadership in AI, cloud infrastructure and enterprise technology. Before joining Orbital, Jon held leadership roles at Kyndryl and AWS, including Head of AI for the UK and Ireland and EMEA Compute Lead. Previously, he was a Managing Director at Accenture, leading DevOps and full-stack engineering in the UK and Ireland. His experience also includes building trading infrastructure at Goldman Sachs and the London Stock Exchange Group.
THE PROGRAMME
Strategy, with its
sleeves rolled up.
Fireside chats, panels and selected presentations, grounded in the realities of successful deployment. One track, with space for questions and conversation.
The questions we'll explore:
01 From strategy to a workable scope
How do you turn an AI ambition into a deployment initiative that engineering, business and compliance can all work with?
Use-case boundaries · Ownership · Success criteria
02 Knowing what is safe enough to deploy
What evidence helps you understand the risks, set limits and make a grounded decision about moving into production?
Evaluation · Risk boundaries · Human oversight
03 The realities of getting AI live
What did successful deployments actually take? Practitioners discuss the tooling, processes and organisational choices behind the result.
Integration · Delivery processes · Lessons learned
04 Keeping it useful, reliable and accountable
What needs to happen after launch as the system, its users and the business around it change?
Monitoring · Operational ownership · Change
Your Day at Ham Yard
OCT 21
The Venue
1 Ham Yard,
London W1D 7DT,
United Kingdom
A distinctive theatre and welcoming bar setting near Piccadilly Circus, in the heart of London. A place to listen closely and let the conversation continue.
Located in Soho, just 2 minutes from Piccadilly Circus, offers the perfect luxury event space for AI Strategy & Practice. We'll be using the great, and a 190-seat cinema and stage for single track presentations and the cosy bar area and dinning rooms for networking breaks.
WHO IS THIS DAY FOR?
Three perspectives.
You have an AI strategy to deliver. Getting it into productive use means agreeing what to build, how to make it reliable and which risks you can accept. This is where those conversations come together.
01 / ENGINEERING
Make it useful.
Keep risk under control.
Make it work.
For engineering leads turning ambitions into systems that can be deployed, monitored and maintained.
02 / BUSINESS
Make it useful.
For business unit leads defining the use case, shaping the scope and taking responsibility for value in everyday operations.
03 / COMPLIANCE
Keep risk under control.
For compliance teams establishing boundaries, evidence and oversight that support responsible deployment.
Before you join us.
Join practitioners working through the same challenge: turning AI strategy into productive, reliable use.
Who is this event designed for?
Engineering leads, business unit leads and compliance teams in larger organisations who need to collaborate to deploy AI and keep it working in production.
How technical will the day be?
The focus is on deployment decisions and practical experience across technical, business and compliance teams. Expect discussions of tooling and processes alongside scope, ownership and risk.
Will there be vendor pitches?
No. The event is focused on practitioner experience, deployment lessons and useful discussion. There will not be vendor pitches or tooling demos outside of the sponsor area.