Revisiting the AI Conversation

Two years on: what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what senior leaders are doing about it.

Co-authored by the Accomplish More community and Acora

Two years after its first substantive discussion on AI, the Accomplish More Speakeasy community reconvened in April 2026 to revisit how the technology has developed and what it now means for organisations. The session brought together CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, Directors of Data and AI, and senior leaders from across sectors, including financial services, professional services, education, and media and entertainment.

Discussion centred on six themes:

1. How AI has actually progressed relative to the expectations set in 2024
2. Why data quality and governance remain the most significant barriers to value
3. How cultural and behavioural gaps are proving harder to close than the technology itself
4. What practical adoption looks like on the ground
5. Where the risks are sharpest
6. What the future of work and workforce development might need to become.

The group’s shared conclusion was clear, and also sobering:

AI is genuinely changing how individuals work, but organisations are not yet capturing that value systematically. The bottlenecks have shifted from access and awareness to culture, data, and governance. Closing that gap will require senior leaders to treat AI adoption not as a technology programme, but as an organisational change challenge, and to apply the same discipline to foundations and education that they would to any other transformation.