The keynote opens the conversation.
The workshop does the work.
Photo: Paul Clarke
A keynote can change how a room thinks.
But thinking differently and acting differently are not the same thing.
For organisations that want to move beyond inspiration to execution - from 'we understand the opportunity' to 'we know what we're going to do on Monday morning' - the workshop is where that transition happens.
I work with leadership teams and boards to turn the ideas from the stage into a practical strategic direction: the real opportunities in your specific context, the cultural blockers that will slow you down, and the first deliberate steps that will actually stick.
T H E T H R E E - T I E R M O D E L
The entry point. A standalone keynote designed for your event, conference, or leadership summit. Typically 40–60 minutes. Every keynote includes a pre-event conversation to align with your objectives, and Dave is happy to participate in Q&A and panel sessions as part of the programme.
This is the right starting point for organisations beginning the conversation about AI, or for events that need a senior, credible voice to frame the strategic agenda.
The deeper engagement. A keynote to set the frame, followed by a structured half-day or full-day workshop that takes the leadership team from concept to direction.
Workshop sessions are designed around your organisation's specific context - your sector, your strategic priorities, your current relationship with AI and digital transformation. They are not generic AI frameworks applied to your situation. They are built from your situation outward.
This is the right choice for organisations that are serious about making deliberate progress, not just building awareness.
The ongoing relationship. Board-level or senior leadership team engagement over a defined period - typically six to twelve months. This is not a consultancy retainer with deliverables and workstreams. It is a thinking partnership: access to Dave's perspective at the moments when it matters most, structured around your agenda and your pace.
Organisations in this relationship include boards where Dave provides non-executive challenge and AI strategic oversight, and leadership teams navigating major transformation where an independent, experienced perspective is the most valuable input available.
Conversations about this tier are treated entirely in confidence. To explore whether there's a fit, email:
H O W T H E W O R K S H O P W O R K S
Built around your organisation, not a template
Every workshop begins with a diagnostic conversation. I need to understand your sector, your current AI maturity, your strategic priorities, and - critically - where the cultural resistance will come from. Only then can I design a session that will actually move the needle.
A typical Tier 2 engagement follows this arc: the keynote sets the intellectual frame and creates shared vocabulary across the team. The workshop then uses that frame to interrogate your specific context - mapping the real opportunities, identifying the cultural and structural blockers, and building the first draft of a direction that the team owns and believes in.
The output is not a document. It is alignment. A team that has moved from scattered individual opinions about AI to a shared, strategic understanding of where they are going and why.
W H A T O R G A N I S A T I O N S L E A V E W I T H
- A shared vocabulary - everyone in the room using the same language to talk about AI, opportunity, and risk.
- Clarity on the real opportunity in their specific context - not generic AI use cases, but the areas where AI genuinely changes the value proposition.
- An honest map of the cultural and structural blockers - the things that will slow adoption down if unaddressed.
- A first set of deliberate next steps - specific, owned, and connected to business purpose.
- The confidence to lead the conversation internally - not just to respond when others raise it.
From scattered experiments to shared strategic intent
A financial services leadership team approached Dave after a keynote at their annual conference. Their challenge: twelve months of AI pilots, each owned by a different function, none connected to a coherent organisational direction. The energy was there. The strategic framework wasn't.
The full-day Tier 2 engagement started with the keynote to the extended team - creating shared context and vocabulary - and then moved into a structured workshop with the senior leadership group. The session mapped the genuine opportunities specific to their business (not generic fintech AI use cases), surfaced the cultural resistance that had stalled previous change programmes, and built the beginning of a governance structure they called 'governing progress, not blocking it.'
By the end of the day, the team had aligned on three things: a shared ambition for what kind of AI-enabled organisation they wanted to be, two immediate priorities to create early momentum, and a governance framework that made progress feel safe rather than reckless.
Six months later, a follow-up conversation confirmed that both immediate priorities had been implemented - and that the language from the workshop was still being used in leadership team meetings.
Redesigning a digital strategy for an agentic world
A leading research university was aware that its external digital presence had been built for a world of search engines and static websites - and that the world had moved on. The question they brought to Dave was not 'what should we do about AI?' but the sharper and more important question: 'how do we redesign our relationship with audiences who now discover us through AI agents, not our homepage?'
The engagement began with a keynote to the university's digital leadership team, followed by a structured workshop that combined live demonstrations of agentic discovery with facilitated strategy sessions. The team used the session to surface assumptions about how their audiences behaved, interrogate the implications of the agentic shift for their specific context, and develop the first set of guiding principles for a revised digital strategy.
The output was a framework the team could own - not a consultancy-driven document, but a set of shared strategic principles grounded in the team's own insights, sharpened by external challenge and expertise.
I S T H I S T H E R I G H T E N G A G E M E N T F O R Y O U R O R G A N I S A T I O N ?
The Tier 2 workshop is most valuable for organisations that have already made a commitment to AI-led transformation - or are on the verge of it - and recognise that the cultural and strategic dimensions are at least as challenging as the technical ones.
The Tier 3 advisory relationship is most valuable for boards and senior leadership teams that want ongoing access to an independent perspective - someone who combines practical technology understanding with board-level commercial accountability, and who will say what a room full of executives sometimes can't say to each other.
If you're not sure which tier is right for your situation, start with the keynote. The conversation that follows will usually answer the question.
To discuss a workshop or advisory engagement:
Diana Boulter | DBA Speakers | diana@dbaspeakers.com | +44 7554 440537