Episode Summary
90% of companies have invested in AI. Fewer than 40% can point to a measurable result.
That single stat from McKinsey’s Global Institute report, shared from the stage in Edinburgh, set the tone for one of the most honest, substantive AI events Sooz Young has ever attended.
In this episode, Sooz Young takes you inside the European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit (6th edition), where she joined speakers from Vodafone, Booking.com, Lloyds Banking Group, Uber, Zoom, Carrefour, Raiffeisen Bank and the EU Publications Office for two days of genuinely unfiltered conversation about what’s actually happening with AI in organisations right now.
This is a longer episode, and worth every minute. Grab a coffee.
In this episode you'll learn:
- Why 90% of AI investment is failing to deliver, and what it tells us about the real problem
- Why trust in AI is now a competitive advantage, not a compliance checkbox
- What “trust by design” actually means, and how it changes the way you build AI systems
- Why 82% of people believe AI could be misused (and it’s going up, not down)
- The Booking.com principle: AI for speed, humans for trust
- The 5 principles Booking.com uses for human-AI collaboration in customer service
- Why critical thinking is the fastest growing human skill, up 185% among AI learners
- The accountability gap: who is responsible when an agentic AI system gets it wrong?
- The 7 archetypes of human-AI work, and where you sit on the spectrum right now
- The uncanny valley in AI: why emotional response is a design challenge, not a comms problem
- The cognitive risk nobody is talking about loudly enough, and what it means for your brain
- Why “conversational design at scale is not a design problem, it’s an organisational design problem”
- What Omotenashi (Japanese wholehearted hospitality) reveals about AI’s biggest limitation
- The growth mindset shift: stop asking “where can AI cut costs?” and start asking “what can AI make possible?”
- The AI Scotland programme for Scottish SMEs, and what it could mean for your business
- 3 practical actions you can take from everything in this episode, right now
Episode Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction and the McKinsey stat that stopped Sooz in her tracks
- 05:34 What the European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit actually is, and why it’s different
- 11:03 Thread 1: Trust is the product
- 16:03 Thread 2: Human skills are getting more valuable, not less
- 18:48 Thread 3: Agentic AI is in production, and messier than the demos
- 27:32 Thread 4: The real problem is almost never the technology
- 32:53 The Future of Work panel, Jared Brown, Martin Krcek, Dr. Kulvinder Panesar
- 38:50 Standout moments: Omotenashi, Booking.com, Raiffeisen Bank, design thinking
- 44:29 The growth mindset shift and AI Scotland
- 49:44 3 practical actions for your business right now
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