Roundtable leadership event | 17 November 2026, 14:00–15:30 | Addleshaw Goddard & the Association of Chief Executives
Two years ago, AI in public services was a pilot. A pitch deck. A promise.
Today it sits inside daily operations across government and arm’s-length bodies, and the conversation has moved on: not “should we try this?” but “what has it actually delivered, and what did it cost us to find out?”
AI Expert Andrew Grill is joining this roundtable to share what I’m seeing on the ground with public sector leaders: where AI has genuinely sliced repetitive, high-volume tasks out of frontline and back-office roles, freeing people for the judgement work only they can do, and where the pilots that looked promising on a slide never survived contact with a live service.
Andrew will be covering:
- Where the productivity gains are real versus where they’re an illusion dressed up in a dashboard
- What breaks when you move from pilot to frontline, and why so many public bodies stall at exactly that point
- Where ambition is warranted and where caution is overdue for arm’s-length bodies weighing their next move
- The missed opportunities: the AI use cases public bodies aren’t touching yet, and should be
Alongside Andrew, Leonie Milliner (Chief Executive and Registrar, General Optical Council) will bring the regulator’s-eye view: what AI does to service delivery and risk inside a highly regulated, public-facing organisation.
Addleshaw Goddard will open on governance, procurement and accountability, and the session closes with a roundtable discussion putting the hard questions to the room: measurable value versus expectation, the governance structures two years of experience have actually taught us, and what it takes to prove AI is delivering on mission, not just trimming internal cost.
This isn’t a futurism session. It’s a stocktake, from people who’ve done the work, for leaders who need to decide what comes next.
