Most organisations have the right intentions. Very few have five managers who agree on what they are.

Plus: Why Ipsos wrote the rules before it rolled out the tools

From the aibl team

This week, we spoke to Kerri O’Neill, Chief People Officer at Ipsos UK and Ireland, and the company’s Global AI Workforce Transformation Lead.

Before giving AI access to all 20,000 of its people, across every role and geography, Ipsos started with a philosophy. What they were designing against was what Kerri calls cognitive surrender: accepting AI output without questioning it, growing more confident even as the accuracy drops.

In most mid-market businesses we speak to, that sequence is reversed: access gets prioritised, and judgement becomes a problem for later. At Ipsos, that came first.

I’m also pleased to share the first findings from research we’ve had in the field over the last quarter. We’re grateful for the insights from over 750 mid-market leaders, most of whom are C-Suite and MD-level.

We’ll be rolling out these findings in various pieces and on stage at workforceLIVE next month, but I wanted to start by inviting you to take The 5 Manager Test.

The survey results were conclusive that strategic clarity is the keystone to an effective and profitable AI rollout, and the test is a simple way to see whether you’re on the right track. Read AI in Practice below to take the test (and learn why it matters).

Why Ipsos wrote the rules before rolling out the tools

When a significant new technology arrives, the instinct is to start with the tools. Kerri O’Neill has spent over two decades in HR watching organisations move through technology cycles. As Chief People Officer at Ipsos in the UK and Ireland, and its Global AI Workforce Transformation Lead, she thinks that sequence is where most organisations go wrong.

Starting with the philosophy, not the tools

Ipsos is over fifty years old, and its biggest periods of growth have tracked major technological shifts: face-to-face to telephone, telephone to internet, now internet to AI. Each time the question was the same: how do you adopt a new technology without losing what the business actually is?

“Most people when they talk about adoption, they tend to start with technology. But what’s interesting about what Ipsos has done is start with a philosophy. And that’s really helped people understand, embrace and experiment, because they know the frame by which we want to work with this technology.”

Watch the full video interview:

From aibl’s survey

Sample: 755 senior mid-market executives

Ready to take the 5 Managers Test? It’s pretty simple tbh. Here’s the question as we asked it in the survey:

“If we asked 5 managers to name your top 3 AI priorities, how many would agree?”

Now pick a number between 1-5.

Most AI programmes fail the five manager test. If four of them give you the same answer, you’re in rare company. In our study, fewer than one in four believe that would happen in their organisation.

Product spotlight of the week

This week we’ve been tracking Skai, a commerce media platform gaining traction with brands and agencies running paid search, paid social, and retail media across multiple channels and retailers.

Anyone managing spend across those channels from separate dashboards knows the problem: fragmented data, manual reporting, no single view of where money is working. Skai pulls those channels into one platform, with flat annual fees tied to spend bands that make budgeting more predictable.

Last May it launched Celeste AI, a GenAI agent that sits across the data and answers questions on budget allocation, performance anomalies, and cross-channel comparisons without anyone having to build a report.

Pricing starts around $114k a year, so it fits upper mid-market brands or agencies managing meaningful spend across multiple retailers. It’s one the aibl team is looking at closely for clients operating at that scale.

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