Why AI Adoption Isn’t Paying Off

Lidija Krickovic is an operator, founder and transformation leader who helps organisations turn strategic ambition into work that can actually be executed. Over more than 22 years, she has built, scaled and restructured companies across SaaS, AdTech, HR tech, dating, iGaming, the creator economy and other technology-led sectors, working across more than 40 ventures. As founder and CEO of Growth Geek, she supports founders and investors when a business has outgrown improvised solutions but is not yet ready for a full executive bench. Her work spans operating models, workflow redesign, organisational structure, management systems, accountability and growth. Increasingly, that means preparing organisations to use AI effectively: clarifying the outcome, fixing the foundations and ensuring the business can absorb AI rather than simply adopt more tools or run more pilots. Lidija brings the perspective of the person accountable for results inside the real business. She is especially interested in the gap between individual productivity gains and organisation-wide value, and in how AI exposes unclear ownership, weak processes and poor management.

Kristi Conlon is a global learning and organizational capability leader, executive coach, and founder of Managing AI-Enabled Work™. Her experience spans startup and turnarounds, AI transformations, and more than two decades at Intel leading learning and capability initiatives across global organizations. Kristi works with leaders and organizations to translate AI adoption into sustainable business and workforce performance. Her work focuses on how human and AI contributions come together in everyday work—and on the leadership of judgment, workforce capability, accountability, and practical work conditions required to realize value from AI responsibly.

Liz Naylor has spent nearly 20 years in Learning & Development and still gets excited by new ways to help people learn. A self-confessed AI enthusiast, she works with global organisations as a Senior Learning Consultant at NIIT, helping Learning teams embrace AI and build the capabilities needed for the future. From launching enterprise-wide AI Academies to supporting large-scale learning transformations, her focus is on making AI practical, human, and useful, rather than just another piece of shiny technology.

Joe is the founder of humari, which he built because he’s always cared deeply about humanity in the workplace and believes the age of AI demands it more than ever. He is a regular guest speaker at London Business School’s MBA programme and a recognised voice on leadership, culture and the human side of AI — quoted in the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph and Personnel Today and invited to serve as a Behavioural Science advisor and panel member for the World Economic Forum’s Responsible Leadership programme. As a Managing Director at Accenture, he led their Workforce Reinvention and Leadership & Culture practices, prior to which he looked after the Growth Cultures practice at award-winning agency ?What If! Innovation.

Shaje Ganny is President and Co-Founder of the Swiss AI Academy Association, a Geneva-based nonprofit for AI literacy and responsible AI education, and author of the Amazon best seller AI Won't Bite. He is the creator of the Bionic Context Protocol, a framework for preserving human capability as AI becomes more capable and more embedded, launched at Davos 2026, and he co-chairs the IEEE education subcommittee working on international standards for education. His message to the private and public sector is the same: deploying AI and delivering business value are two different jobs, literacy is where value starts, and the things AI does not have, judgment, ethics and emotional intelligence, are becoming the scarcest assets at work. He has spent the past 20 years leading digital transformation and bringing AI to life at Procter & Gamble, teaches the master's course "AI for Leaders" at FHNW, is a TEDx speaker, and advises government ministries as well as company CIOs on AI policy.