In this Episode Mark Rothwell-Brooks is joined by Debra Bilikha and they explore why organisations — especially banks and financial institutions across the GCC — are struggling to move from AI enthusiasm to AI execution. While pilots and demos are everywhere, enterprise-scale deployment remains rare. The core issue isn’t AI itself, but a lack of AI readiness.

The discussion highlights the biggest barriers to implementation: chaotic data landscapes, missing governance frameworks, shadow AI, weak monitoring, and the absence of meaningful outcome-based measurement. AI exposes underlying organisational weaknesses, particularly in data quality and accessibility, which account for the majority of delivery effort.

Today we're joined by Darren Wray and Robert Westmacott as we dive into the most pressing topics in modern technology, large language models, and in this episode, we explore how organizations are navigating the delicate balance between the transformational benefits of LLMs and the risks that they introduce.

In this episode, we are joined by Barbara Gottardi, CEO of Finbridge Global. We talk about how Financial Institutions strangle Fintechs during the process of identifying and onboarding them and how there's a better way for both parties to succeed.

Barbara talks about her ambition that Finbridge Global becomes the worlds leading Fintech Credential platform and muses what was going through her mind to leave the (relative) safety of a corporate career as CIO at one of the the worlds largest Banks to embrace the life of an entrepreneur and CEO of her own start-up.