AI technology is rapidly moving past its initial hype and maturing into a technological foundation for the future of business.
Organisations are clearly seeing the benefits of AI adoption. According to Nash Squared figures, 90% of businesses are at least piloting AI/ML implementations, with nearly a fifth reporting large-scale adoption. And despite the concerns about “AI taking jobs,” the same report actually found that organisations with large-scale AI programmes employed more people.
AI technology is clearly at a stage where companies are using it to well and truly “work smarter, not harder.” Which is why it’s a great time to present the Crimson Innovation Conference 2025; which this year is all about Building Your Digital Workforce.
Crimson Innovation Conference 2025: Build Your Digital Workforce
Unlocking AI was just the start. Now it’s time to build a digital workforce and shape the future of work.
Now the dust is starting to settle around AI technology, we are seeing a move away from hype-tinged novelty and towards widespread level-headed adoption. But make no mistake – the future of work is here, and will be inextricably powered by AI, data, and automation.
This year’s Innovation Conference is all about developing your digital-first workforce – exploring ways that the intersection of human skills, AI, and data can come together to help organisations of all kinds scale smarter, boost efficiency and unlock new capacity without over-inflating headcount.
This totally free conference focuses strictly on the practical applications of an AI-empowered workforce, following a fictional company’s journey to AI adoption. Our esteemed, expert guests will provide unmissable insight into how to align people, platforms, and processes to make positive AI integration a reality.
Our Speakers
- Morning Keynote: Daniel Figueiredo, Microsoft Global AI Strategist – Kicking off proceedings, Daniel will chat to us about AI journeys, agentic AI trends, and the future of intelligent automation.
- Emilia Turner & Rhea Odedra, Taylor Wimpey – Sharing the practicalities of the esteemed housebuilder’s journey in scaling Microsoft Copilot from 300 to 2,000 users throughout the firm.
- Crimson’s Very Own Microsoft Experts – providing practical AI demos across sales, marketing, customer service, operations, and collaboration.
- Leadership Panels – Discussing how to prepare your workforce for agentic AI collaboration with wisdom from Crimson’s own business strategy, people, and change experts.
- Afternoon Keynote: Professor Steve Peters – In this extra special keynote talk, psychiatrist and bestselling self-help author of The Chimp Paradox will join us to discuss human mindset in the age of AI.
This event promises to provide inspiration, debate, and practical takeaways you can implement straight away.
We are honoured to be joined by Professor Steve Peters, bestselling author of The Chimp Paradox, one of the UK’s most sought-after thinkers on human behaviour, mindset, and resilience. At our conference, Professor Peters will apply his groundbreaking approach to the challenges of AI-driven change, further exploring how business and tech leaders can prepare themselves and their teams to succeed in this new era.
Over 80 IT leaders attended last year’s event so get your LinkedIn QR code at the ready (or business cards if you’re old school) as you’ll also enjoy a networking breakfast, coffee break, and lunch where you can discuss the sessions with your peers.
This is exclusively an in-person event – no replay links here! If you want to benefit, you’ll have to be in the room at the picturesque Hogarth’s Hotel, Solihull on the 13th of November 2025.
Registration is required for attendance, so don’t miss out! Get your free ticket today.
The Digital Workforce Discussion
“I can’t wait to bring leaders together to explore how AI, data, and automation can expand capacity without unnecessary headcount. What excites me most is the live transformation of our fictitious company, showing exactly how these technologies can be applied in practice; it’s something you can’t get from a webinar.”
Mark Britton – Marketing Director
Our 2025 Innovation Conference promises to help you make sense of the AI adoption noise and explore tangible strategies and use cases to foster AI adoption within your organisation.
Let’s take a look at some of the themes our marketing and events team foresee being explored at the event.
Reenvisioning Growth Via Headcount
We think the discussion “Preparing People for the Age of Digital Employees” will turn out to be a cornerstone of the conference. The future of work will be based around humans working alongside AI – effectively blending human skill, AI, and automation to achieve efficiency and scalability gains without over-inflating headcount.
Traditionally, business growth and increased headcount have gone hand in hand – often presenting costs on the journey to delivering that growth. However, now AI is on the scene, we are keen to explore what that means for the future of hiring and headcount; especially in data-heavy fields like sales, marketing, and contact centre staffing.
So, what will business growth look like in the near future, especially for these specialisms? Will the “hire to grow” model continue to be the default? Will more organisations look to AI and automation as engines for business growth? And what roles are going to be created from AI adoption, in line with the Nash Squared statistic above?
The Evolving Partnership Between Humans and AI
Countless knowledge workers are experiencing the benefits of working alongside AI. Whether it’s sorting through data, creating code, drafting rough first versions of documents, or prioritising workflows, many of us have experienced first-hand the hype-free ways that AI can boost our day-to-day productivity.
With the mental “heavy lifting” of more mundane tasks taken away, white-collar workers are freer to use their minds in increasingly value-added ways – using their human creative, strategic, and flexible problem-solving grey matter. And not only can this make those team members’ work more fulfilling, it can also increase the ROI on the employer’s investment in them.
AI: Providing a Competitive Edge
Yet it would be remiss of us to frame AI adoption solely around boosting productivity and/or cutting costs. AI adoption can enable totally new and innovative approaches, services, and business models which can leave non-AI adopting competitors in the dust.
Our event agenda highlights AI’s ability to accelerate sales, marketing, and customer service with AI. There are significant gains to be made in these historically data-driven areas, like automated lead qualification, extracting insights from complex data, and improving customer response times.
As mentioned above, benefits like these free up your human teams’ cognitive load, better enabling them to think freely and creatively, adding value that only humans can.
But more crucially, this event is an opportunity to gain foresight into the future of work alongside AI. Adopting AI now positions you in the best position to usher in a tech-enabled workforce and meet future market demands.
Data: The New Foundation of Business Success
Data has always been a critical asset in business. But in order to prepare for AI adoption, strong, clean data practices and infrastructure are unavoidably essential. That’s why we are looking forward to Caroline and Kieran’s session about building strong data foundations with Copilot’s help.
Microsoft’s Syntex document processing services are pivotal for ingesting, classifying, and analysing data locked away in documents and transforming it into an AI-ready format. Purview is Microsoft’s data management, governance, and protection toolset to secure and harmonise your data estate.
Within this talk, our experts will show how to harness these services in tandem with Sales Copilot and Customer Insights; focusing on the ability for data and AI to predict customer needs and close deals faster. A firm reminder that AI is only as good as the data it’s built on.
No Code AI: The Power (Platform) in Your Hands
Technologies integrate best when they don’t demand extensive technical knowledge of their user base. Power Platform (via Power Apps and Power Automate) features no-code AI/ML creation tool AI Builder, which puts customisable AI-enabled workflows in the hands of even the least technical teams – without sacrificing IT governance, oversight or security.
In their talk, “Smarter Customer Service with Microsoft Copilot & AI Builder,” Peter and David will be sharing how customer service teams can use these tools to triage queries, predict desired outcomes, and reduce human handling time – enabling contact centre teams to reduce time spent on straightforward cases and focus on cases that genuinely need human creativity and empathy.
This is an AI application that truly means a lot to us. With the potential to change lives across our key focus areas of Higher Education and Social Housing, there’s no time like the present to be putting effective no code AI tools in the hands of those who head up contact centres. Not just to create delighted customers time and time again, but to boost support to those in need, precisely when they need it.
Practical Guest Insights into AI Strategy and Implementation
We’re looking forward to hype-free practical insights from the team at Taylor Wimpey and direct from the upper echelons of Microsoft. We’re sure both talks will provide tangible ideas that our guests will be able to take away and benefit from immediately.
This will provide an unmissable opportunity for business leaders to discuss how to get ahead of the curve and start making informed, practical decisions about future AI adoption and investment.
Our team is particularly excited to hear about Taylor Wimpey’s journey to widespread AI roll-out – a concrete AI adoption success story. Emilia and Rhea will share the challenges, trials, and tribulations of implementing AI across such a large organisation. Their story is proof that there is scope there to succeed with AI, regardless of organisation size.
Managing the “AI as Co-Collaborator” Shift
As any change management practitioner will tell you, there is far more to embedding new technologies within an organisation than simply handing over the reins to workers and saying “off you go.”
In an environment where workplaces are developing a collaborative attitude between AI and humans, our final panel discussion will prove to be particularly enlightening. Four of Crimson’s specialist leaders will discuss how firms can juggle business strategy, change management, and advance technology – as well as human skills and culture – to build an environment where AI is an embedded collaborator.
Register for the Crimson Innovation Conference 2025: Build Your Digital Workforce
This is your invite to our free 2025 Innovation Conference. Spots are limited – register today so you don’t miss out!
Event Details for Your Calendar
Crimson Innovation Conference 2025: Build Your Digital Workforce
Thursday 13th November 2025 at 9:30am – 4pm. Doors open at 8:30am.
Hogarths Hotel Solihull, Four Ashes Road, B93 8QE (Map & Directions)