The AI worked in the sandbox. Then it met the real world. David Hardoon learned that lesson during an ATM optimization project designed to improve cash-delivery routes. Once deployed, the system collided with traffic and unpredictable schedules, which are the realities that face the people doing the work. Recorded at *EVOLVE26* Singapore, this episode of The AI Forecast brings Paul Muller together with David Hardoon, Head of Advanced AI at Accenture, to explore why the human side of AI transformation can determine whether promising technology ever delivers value in production.

Is hands-off AI adoption turning your business into the "Wild West?" Handing out credit cards for unlimited tokens without proper guard rails is a recipe for failure. Discover why establishing best practices and security rails is essential as AI agents transform the enterprise.

Mariam el Baghdady (Manager, Digital Marketing, Snowflake) shows how AI changed two of her most time-consuming tasks: weekly performance reporting and quarterly forecasting across 20+ countries. The old reality: spending hours formatting data just so she could talk about it. Now a weekly HTML report in CoCo flags what needs attention across channels and regions in minutes, and a forecast that used to take nearly a full week turns around in a fraction of the time. She also shares how she got there with no technical background whatsoever.

Every campaign launch comes with the same overhead: write the brief, rewrite it for creative, rewrite it again for email ops, digital, and whoever else needs a version of it. Multiply that by every campaign your team runs, and weeks disappear before the work even starts. In this clip from the Thought Tank: Marketing in the Age of Agents, ThoughtSpot SVP Marketing EMEA Katie Marcham and CMO Micheline Nijmeh share the agent that changed that.

What if you could build a data pipeline by just describing it in plain English? Sudais sits down with Maha, Astera's AI evangelist and one of the thought leaders behind ARIA, to talk about Astera's helper agents: what they are, why we built them, and where they're heading. ARIA is a set of specialized agents for Astera products like Centerprise and ReportMiner. Describe what you want, like migrating data from a SQL database to Snowflake, and the agent configures the pipeline for you.