(FS:R) - Building an Agentic Company - Tom Dean
Details
Session Overview:
Most AI talks focus on what the tools can do. This one is about what changes when AI starts to operate inside a business. I run Stackstone Consulting with AI agents embedded into planning, communication, CRM, and day-to-day operations.
In this session, I’ll show what that actually looks like in practice: where it creates leverage, where it breaks, and why those failures are often the most useful part. From email-threading mistakes to stale briefings and missed task capture, this is a grounded look at what happens when AI moves beyond personal productivity and starts taking on operational responsibility.
The result is a more realistic view of what it means to build an agentic company — and where to start if you want to do the same.
FutureSkills Learning Outcomes
- Understand the difference between personal AI assistant tooling and company-wide operational AI, and why that changes trust, governance, and failure modes
- See how real failure stories from an AI agent system reveal different architectural problems around context, verification, and persistence
- Learn why the first useful AI agent is often an orchestrator rather than a task automator
- Understand how to adopt AI from the periphery of an existing process, then move inward as confidence grows
- Leave with a framework for deciding where to deploy AI operationally and what infrastructure it needs to work.
Personal Bio:
Tom Dean is the founder of Stackstone Consulting, an AI strategy and implementation consultancy based in Oxfordshire.
He helps businesses adopt AI in ways that stick — not as isolated experiments, but as part of how work actually gets done. Before founding Stackstone, Tom worked at NewOrbit Ltd as Director of Change, building process and structure that helped teams learn through feedback and system design.
That background now shapes how he approaches AI: not just as a tool, but as something that needs the right operating model around it to become genuinely useful. He now runs his consultancy as a live testbed for what agentic ways of working look like in real client and operational contexts.
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Logistics - In-person and Remote
- >>> Luma Calendar Page <<<
- In person at Pentahotel in Reading
- Online via Google Meet - https://meet.google.com/ics-iddz-uht
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Schedule
18:30: Icebreaker on Miro
18.50: (FS:R) FutureSkills : Reading - Introduction
19:00: - (FS:R) - Building an Agentic Company - Tom Dean
20:15: Close
Optional - 21:00 - England vs Croatia - World Cup Group Stage
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We look forward to seeing you there!
Adam and Stu
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About (FS:R) FutureSkills : Reading - Our mission is to grow the community of future facing technologists in Reading and share new trends and techniques that will help us accelerate into the future.
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