AI and talent were the talk of the room. The real work is reconfiguring the company around them.
Reflections from the techUK Annual Dinner 2026
Last week, David — one of our CTOs — and I attended the techUK Annual Dinner as new members. Black tie, central London, around 650 guests: large systems integrators, government and civil service leaders, founders, and people from across the industry, including the team at X.
It was our first as members, and it's a good room to be new in. You spend most of your professional life on one side of the deal table; an evening like this puts you shoulder to shoulder with the people building, buying, financing and regulating the technology we assess every day.
Three speakers set the tone. I'll leave the politics to the political journalists — but the themes are worth sharing, because they say a lot about where the industry thinks it's heading.
What was being shared
From renting the stack to owning it. The government's framing was ambition-forward: Britain moving from being a tenant of global AI — hosting the frontier labs — to a landlord with its own sovereign capability. Compute, chips, talent, and adoption, anchored in communities with real industrial heritage. The recurring word was agency: citizens, businesses and the state having a genuine stake in how AI gets used, rather than having it happen to them. The public-sector examples were concrete — NHS clinicians handed back meaningful time each day through everyday AI tools — and the stated principle was augment, don't replace.
Energy is the quiet constraint. The industry view was more grounded. Growth is the priority, but the binding limit on it is energy cost: UK firms pay some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, well above France or Germany, and that quietly suppresses investment before any AI strategy gets a look-in. Back the scale-ups. Keep markets open. And be clear-eyed about sovereign capability — which, as one speaker put it, means far more than simply committing to "buy British."
Value comes from deployment, not purchase. The most useful line of the night, for me: AI has the biggest productivity potential of any technology in a generation, but the value now comes from deployment, not from buying it. The next phase isn't about who has access to the models. It's about who actually gets them working inside real organisations.
All of it sensible. All of it true. But sitting there as someone who looks inside companies for a living, I kept coming back to the same thought.
The thing nobody was quite saying
We keep framing this as an AI problem, or a talent problem. Buy the right models. Hire the right people. Train the workforce.
It's neither. It's an organisational one.
You can license the best models and recruit brilliant people and still get almost nothing back — because the teams, the reporting lines, the incentives and the everyday ways of working were all designed for a world that has already gone. AI doesn't slot neatly into an org chart built for 2015. It exposes it.
In due diligence we see this constantly. The technology is rarely the thing that destroys value after a deal. It's the assumption that you can bolt new capability onto an unchanged operating model and expect a different result. New tools, old structures — and the value quietly leaks away in the gap between them.
The organisations that win the next few years won't be the ones with the most AI. They'll be the ones willing to do the harder, less glamorous work: reconfiguring how the whole company operates around new ways of working. Redrawing teams. Rethinking who decides what. Accepting that "augment, not replace" isn't a slogan — it's a redesign.
That's the part nobody claps for at a black-tie dinner. It doesn't fit on an awards stage. But it's where the actual advantage is won or lost.
Where we've written more
This is the thread running through much of our work — assessing AI-native targets, and helping leaders rethink their own teams on a realistic horizon rather than a hopeful one. If it's useful, our guide "The Corporate Development challenge is more than AI, it's People" goes deeper on exactly this, alongside the rest of our practitioner resources.
A good evening, a sharp room, and a useful reminder: the technology is the easy part. The reconfiguration is the work.
Hutton Henry is founder of Beyond M&A, a tech and people due diligence firm for private equity and corporate development teams.
Source: techUK Annual Dinner 2026