LLMs in 2026: What Business Leaders Need to Understand Now
Details
The AI conversation has moved beyond hype.
LLMs in 2026: What Business Leaders Need to Understand Now
Please register here as well - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/llms-in-2026-what-business-leaders-need-to-understand-now-tickets-1989637646761
The AI conversation has moved beyond hype. In 2026, the biggest shift in large language models isn’t raw capability, it’s reliability, consistency, and how organisations actually deploy AI in production.
At this Scotland Applied AI Meetup, we will be joined by Richard Bownes for a practical discussion on what’s really happening in the LLM landscape and what it means for business leaders navigating AI transformation.
Rather than chasing headline model improvements, organisations are now focused on building dependable AI systems that can operate safely, repeatedly, and at scale.
Richard will break down the real-world evolution of the AI stack, from simple LLM calls through to workflows, tool calling, MCP servers, and agent-based architectures, and explain what each layer is designed to solve.
This session will also explore:
- Why enterprise AI success depends more on system design than model choice
- The trade-off between impressive demos and reliable production systems
- What “stateful AI” actually means in practice
- The organisational and leadership challenges emerging as AI adoption scales
- What leaders should prioritise now to avoid falling behind
A practical session for technology, data, product, and business leaders looking to cut through the noise and understand where enterprise AI is really heading.
Chair - Michael Young, CEO, MBN Solutions
Speaker - Richard Bownes, Applied AI
Richard is a senior AI builder and leader, currently working at an AI Native consultancy where he looks after applied AI, solutions architecture, delivery, internal product development and developer advocacy. From an academic background in machine learning to internet scale public and private sector projects, NLP start ups and Data and AI consultancy Richard brings interdisciplinary and industry experience to solve meaningful and challenging problems for clients of all sizes.