90% of companies have invested in AI. Fewer than 40% are seeing any measurable results.

That stat from McKinsey’s Global Institute report, published November 2025 was the opening note at the European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit in Edinburgh. And it set the tone for everything that followed.

Sooz Young attended as a moderator and panellist at the sixth edition of this summit, held at the University of Edinburgh from 17–19 March 2026. The theme was Harnessing Agentic AI. The thread running through every session, every room, every conversation was this: human centric.

What made this different from most AI events? These people weren’t performing for a sales audience. They were talking to each other, honestly, about what actually works and what doesn’t.

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FIVE STANDOUT MOMENTS FROM OTHER SESSIONS

Omotenashi and what AI still can’t replicate. Daniel Orenes Fernandez (Uber) opened with Japan’s net promoter score: negative 52. In a country where the standard of service is so high that merely meeting expectations doesn’t move the needle, the lesson for AI design is that you cannot just think about whether the system works. You have to think about what the cultural and emotional expectations surrounding the experience are and what the person on the other end actually needs.

Booking.com’s five principles and the closing line. Raquel Serrano (Booking.com) walked through their five principles for human-AI collaboration: seamless integration, AI for speed and humans for trust, learning with every interaction, intent-driven anticipation, and ethical transparent guardrails. Her closing line: “The best customer service experiences are not the ones with the most AI. They’re the ones with the most alignment between people, purpose and technology.”

Raiffeisen Bank and the organisational design problem. The Raiffeisen story (covered in Thread 4) carries a lesson that scales to any business, any size: the problem is almost never the tool. It’s the structure around the tool.

The value of design. Ray-Allen Taylor (IdeasBay): “The common illusion is that AI replaces design. The reality is that AI makes design more critical than ever.” AI can generate, iterate, produce. It cannot decide what good looks like. It cannot weigh trade-offs between efficiency and integrity. Human judgment about what to build and why becomes more important as AI gets faster and better at the building.

The growth mindset shift and AI Scotland. Christoph Eslinger (IdeasBay) on the mindset shift organisations need: stop asking “where can AI cut costs?” and start asking “where can AI help us do things we couldn’t do before?” Cost-cutting thinking makes you leaner. Growth thinking makes you different. On 20 March the day after the summit the Scottish Government launched AI Scotland, a new programme to help Scottish SMEs implement AI with ethical and legal frameworks built in. More details to follow as Sooz researches further.

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