Leadership - Dave Coplin — Keynote Speaker, Author & AI Strategist

A tattered white flag flying from a wooden pole against an overcast grey sky, torn and fraying at the edges as it whips in the wind, beneath bold white headline text reading "The Rise of Cognitive Surrender?" with "COGNITIVE SURRENDER" emphasised in heavier type.

September 3, 2026

Dave Coplin

Are We Still Thinking?

The big fear I'm hearing from chief executives isn't whether AI will get things wrong, or whether it'll cost too much. It's that their people will keep getting the right answers without any idea how those...

Silhouetted treeline and hills beneath a dense, star-filled night sky with a faint meteor streak, above bold white headline text reading "We Are All of Us in the Gutter" with "ALL OF US" emphasised in heavier type.

August 27, 2026

Dave Coplin

Confidence and Curiosity

Ask Londoners where they learned to use AI and the answer is stark. Three-quarters taught themselves by experimenting. Educational institutions accounted for 8%. Libraries and community groups, 4%. Incandescent...

A tall weathered wooden ladder leaning against a bare concrete wall in an empty room. The lower half of the ladder has no rungs at all — just two bare side rails rising from the floor — with the rungs beginning only above head height, so the ladder cannot be climbed from the ground. Overlaid text reads "Not a bang but a whimper?"

August 20, 2026

Dave Coplin

The Jobs Apocalypse

Last week in the UK, the A-level results landed and just as happens every year, hundreds of thousands of students and their parents/carers began the scramble to pass through one of the final gateways...

A vintage hand grenade mounted upright on a bolted metal base sits on a polished wooden desk, with a paper ticket numbered "1" hanging from its pin ring. Beside it, an engraved wooden desk sign reads "Complaints Department — Take a Number." Headline text across the top reads "Minutes to write, hours to answer."

August 13, 2026

Dave Coplin

Minutes to Write, Hours to Answer

This is the short version of an argument I’ve set out at length in a paper of the same name - the evidence, the sector detail, and worked examples you can adapt. It’s here if you’d rather have all of...

A robotic hand types on a laptop keyboard in front of a row of humanoid robots, under the title "How I Make This" — header image for Dave Coplin's essay on writing with AI.

August 6, 2026

Dave Coplin

How I Make This

The way things are going these days, that sentence is currently supposed to sound like a confession. Like I’ve been trying to hide something that’s not polite to mention in public or be proud of. Except...

Bodiam Castle surrounded by its still moat, with the headline "Trust is the Moat" overlaid above the turrets

July 23, 2026

Dave Coplin

Trust is the Moat

It held your data, designed the journey, set the price, and waited for you to come to it. Reading through the FCA’s recently published Mills Review and the work I’ve been doing underneath it, what keeps...