The Mind Behind the Machine
Why the most important thing about artificial intelligence isn't artificial.
Read this sentence carefully: “The the mind doesn't see what the the eye reveals.”
Most people miss the repeated words. Your brain — a pattern-recognition system refined over millions of years — skipped right over them. It saw what it expected to see, not what was actually there.
Your organisation's AI systems do the same thing. And for the same reasons.
The Mind Behind the Machine is a programme built on a simple premise: you cannot make good decisions about artificial intelligence until you understand natural intelligence. The biases that shape how humans think are the same biases that shape how AI fails — and how leaders misjudge both.
What Participants Gain
- •The Mind-Machine Map — a proprietary framework mapping five cognitive biases to five AI failure modes, and the strategic implications for any organisation deploying AI
- •A deep understanding of how AI systems process information — grounded in the same cognitive science that explains human perception, memory and decision-making
- •A practical decision framework for evaluating AI opportunities, identifying where human judgement must remain, and avoiding the mistakes that destroy AI ROI
- •Insights from original research synthesising the world’s leading AI thinkers — Amodei, Hassabis, Altman, Hinton, LeCun and others
- •A peer network of senior leaders navigating the same decisions
Format
Keynote
60–90 minutes
A distinctive address for conferences, board away-days and leadership events. Not another AI trends talk — a genuinely different lens on the most important technology of our era.
Executive Workshop
Half-day or full-day
An immersive working session for senior leadership teams. Maximum 25 participants. Interactive, Chatham House Rule, designed to change how your team thinks about AI decisions.
Private Programme
Bespoke, multi-session
A deep engagement built around your organisation’s specific AI challenges. Multiple sessions with interim work and direct access to the programme director. For organisations serious about building lasting AI capability at the leadership level.
Who This Is For
This programme is designed for decision-makers, not technologists:
- •CEOs, board members and C-suite executives making strategic AI decisions
- •PE and VC investors evaluating AI-driven deal flow and portfolio value creation
- •Heads of strategy and transformation leading AI adoption programmes
- •Conference organisers seeking a keynote that goes deeper than the usual AI hype
This is not a technical AI course. It is a thinking programme — for leaders who need to make better decisions about AI, not build the models themselves.
Programme Director
Led by Elliot Ronald. Experimental psychology at Oxford (neural networks and cognitive rule-learning). Two decades of strategy consulting for FTSE 100, PE and sovereign wealth clients. Active frontier technology investor. One of a very small number of people who can speak fluently to both the cognitive science behind intelligence and the commercial reality of deploying AI at enterprise scale.
Enquire
Places are limited and allocated on the basis of seniority and relevance.