The gap is rarely the model. It's everything around it.
AI innovation is moving faster than enterprise adoption. What holds deployments back is organizational readiness, governance complexity, thin talent benches, and no honest line of sight to the P&L. GAILA convenes the leaders carrying that problem — once a year, in one room, for one day.
Peer learning, closed door
Small curated groups of enterprise AI leaders trading real implementation journeys — what worked, what failed, and why. A neutral, trust-first environment with no vendors and nothing to sell.
Industry programs & playbooks
Living adoption playbooks by sector: priority use-case maps, reference architectures, governance frameworks, build-buy-partner models, and metrics that track real business impact.
The annual convening
This summit. Regional chapters feed signal upward into a shared global agenda; the agenda flows back down as practical playbooks members keep using all year.
Two plenaries, four forums, one playbook at the end.
Deep-dive sessions over surface-level keynotes. Case-led discussion from enterprises, not vendors. Every session is built from learning needs members surfaced themselves.
Welcome & the Chatham House Compact
The one rule, why candor matters in this room, and how to get the most from a day built for exchange rather than broadcast.
The Execution Gap
What separated the deployments that paid off this year from the pilots that quietly died — the distance between AI ambition and measurable impact, said plainly.
Agentic AI: from POC to production
Three members walk through real builds — a luxury-retail clienteling agent, a 200-rep field sales assistant on enterprise data, and a multi-agent orchestration attempt — then the floor opens on architecture, secure tool access, and how platforms scored against each other in practice.
AI risk, governance & enterprise posture
A structured debate against a circulated pre-read: agent-breach exposure, the thousands of AI and SaaS apps running without approved SSO, and the real attack surface of autonomous tooling. One side argues the risk is overstated; the other argues we're already exposed.
Each table seeds a sector playbook the alliance maintains year-round.
Four deep-dive forums, two rounds
Rounds run at 1:15 and 2:20, each forum repeating — so every member sits in two of the four rooms. Small groups, facilitated, strictly Chatham House. See the four forums →
Building the playbook
Each forum brings back its sharpest insight and its biggest open question, captured live into the alliance's living adoption playbooks — the asset members keep using long after the room empties.
The Global AI Leaders Agenda
What the next twelve months demand of enterprise AI leadership — across borders and industries — and what the alliance takes on next on behalf of its members.
Pick by where your hardest problem lives right now.
Each forum runs twice so you can sit in two. Facilitated, small, and strictly Chatham House.
Rebuilding the IT org for the AI era
Why standard org structures no longer map. The CAIO role — mandate or scapegoat. Team topologies in practice, transformation expectations vs. reality, and the emerging "most of the work from a fraction of the workforce" models.
Enterprise data strategy & AI readiness
Building the enterprise data layer as AI foundation — and aligning it to the value map and the P&L, not the architecture diagram. Neuro-symbolic pilots, hallucination and citation tooling, and the frameworks members actually trust.
The agentic SDLC & AI tooling
What teams standardized on and why. End-to-end agentic coding workflows, and what "vibe coding" means inside regulated environments. Where the tooling wars actually changed how software gets built.
Talent, careers & the human side of disruption
Layoffs, upskilling, and opportunity — without the LinkedIn gloss. The leadership job search in an AI market, the consultant cannibalization question, and how members are rebuilding teams and themselves.
Peer-curated, invitation-led, accountable for outcomes.
Attendance is capped and balanced across industries so no single sector — or single point of view — dominates the day.
- Chief Information Officers CIO
- Chief Technology Officers CTO
- Chief Digital Officers CDO
- Chief Data & AI Officers CDAO / CAIO
- Innovation & transformation leaders Enterprise
- Business unit leaders accountable for AI outcomes P&L
Lunch seats by sector. Each table is a working group that continues past the summit, feeding the playbook its members rely on.
- Retail & Consumer Products
- Financial Services & Insurance
- Healthcare & Life Sciences
- Manufacturing & Industrial
- Energy & Infrastructure
- Public Sector & Smart Cities
