Attending techUK’s ‘AI Vision to Value’ Conference? How to get the most from your attendance

AI conferences are full of promises. Bold visions of transformation. Inspiring case studies. Ambitious transformation roadmaps. But most delegates return to their desks the day after with the sneaking feeling that the gap between the keynote stage and the reality of their organisation is enormous.

But that doesn’t have to be the case.

So what are our top tips for getting what you need out of the techUK and future conferences? What should you be looking for while you're there? And more importantly, what should you do when you leave?

While You're There: Look For Real Change, Not Tech Spec Sheets

As you move between sessions, ask yourself a simple question about every AI solution you hear about: What actually changed for the people the solution serves?

Did a Council reduce the time social workers spend on admin so they can spend more time with vulnerable adults? Did a housing team use data science to prevent homelessness rather than react to it? Did a system give frontline staff a tool they actually want to use? 

These are the stories that matter.

Many AI solutions promise to transform services. The strongest ones can prove they already have. When you're evaluating what you hear, look for evidence. Look for named Councils. Look for people on stage who do the actual work, not just the executives talking about it. Listen to the uncomfortable questions about what went wrong and how teams handled it. 

The messy, honest conversations are where the real lessons live.

Watch for governance baked in from the start. If someone is talking about AI ethics as an afterthought, bolted on once the system is already built, that's a red flag. Real safety, safeguarding and information security need to be part of the design from day one. 

Otherwise, you're just postponing problems until they become crises.

And pay attention to platform philosophy. The organisations doing AI successfully aren't stitching together dozens of overlapping tools. They're building on solid, trustworthy cloud foundations, like AWS.

After You Leave: Make It Real In Your Organisation

Here's what separates the delegates who actually move the needle from those who don't: they turn what they learned into something tangible within weeks, not months.

Start with a single, real problem. Not the biggest transformation programme your organisation wants to tackle. A specific friction point where you can see a clear outcome. Is it social workers spending too much time on initial assessment admin? Is it housing teams manually sifting through tenancy data to identify who needs help? Is it commissioners struggling to see the real impact of their spending? Find the problem you understand and that your team cares about solving.

Bring together the people who actually do the work. This is non-negotiable. If you leave this conference and assemble a team of only senior leaders and IT people to decide what AI should do, you will build something nobody wants to use. The social worker. The housing officer. The person handling enquiries. They need to shape what gets built. They'll tell you what really matters. They'll spot the risks. And when it's time to launch, they'll be your advocates, not your obstacles.

Governance from the start. Don't wait until you've built something to ask the hard questions about safety, safeguarding, bias and information security. Ask them now. If you're working with sensitive data about vulnerable people, and in local government, you usually are, get your information governance, Data protection, IT and your safeguarding team and your ethics function involved from the beginning. This doesn't slow you down. It actually makes you faster, because you're not retrofitting consent processes and security controls after the fact.

Be honest about what you need help with. Maybe you have strong data science capability and just need help implementing AI thoughtfully. Maybe you have neither data science expertise nor anyone who's done this before. Either way, there are partners who've lived through complex, high-stakes projects and learned what actually works. Find ones who focus on your sector and can point to real outcomes in organisations like yours. Ask them hard questions. Ask them what went wrong. Ask them what they'd do differently. A partner worth working with will give you straight answers.

Set a clear outcome metric and measure it. You'll know your project is working when something measurable improves. When a social worker spends two fewer hours a week on admin, you have two more hours for family contact. When you can identify 30 households at risk of homelessness before they reach crisis point instead of after, you can intervene early. When a commissioner can actually see how their spending translates to changed lives, they can make better decisions. Define what success looks like in the language of your service, not in the language of AI. Then measure it honestly.

You Know What Doesn't Work

Before you leave, it's worth being clear about what the field has learned doesn't work.

AI projects that are led entirely from above, designed by people who don't do the work, rarely succeed. All the intelligence in the world doesn't help if frontline staff don't want to use it.

Big transformation programmes with three-year timescales and £5m budgets often get crushed by the weight of their own expectations, especially for councils or organisations under financial pressure. Start smaller. Learn faster. Scale what works.

Bolting governance onto a system after it's already built creates disasters. Do it right from the start.

Stitching together twenty different vendors to create an AI platform can create complexity that slows you down and costs money - especially in the early days. Build on solid foundations and if not use clear standards.

Most importantly: AI for AI's sake doesn't help anyone. Some of the most powerful changes in local government come from the deliberate decision not to use AI, but to invest that technology budget into people instead.

The Real Work Starts The Day After

Conferences like techUK’s are where you meet others doing this work, hear from people who've already done it, and get inspired. But the real value starts when you go back to your organisation and make it real.

The social worker who gets their time back. The housing team that actually prevents a family from losing their home. The commissioner who can finally see the impact of their choices. The resident who gets the right support at the right time.

That's the difference that matters.

Good luck. We're here to help.