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Speaker #1 - Bruno Lacerda

Chief Technology Officer @ Stateful Robotics

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bfalacerda/

Bruno Lacerda is CTO and co-founder of Stateful Robotics, a University of Oxford spin-out building decision intelligence for robots in the real world. Before founding Stateful he spent thirteen years as an academic researcher at the University of Birmingham and the Oxford Robotics Institute, working on planning under uncertainty and formal methods for robots that operate over long horizons. He has applied these techniques across domains spanning high-hazard inspection, environmental monitoring, logistics and service robotics, on robots ranging from wheeled platforms to quadrupeds and underwater vehicles.

Talk Title: Stateful: Decision Intelligence for robots in the real world

Robot autonomy stacks are now mature and widely deployed, but high-level robot behaviour is still mostly scripted by hand. That means deployments that don't scale, and suboptimal reactions when the world changes. Stateful Robotics, a University of Oxford spin-out grounded in more than a decade of research, builds the missing decision layer: a robot-agnostic planning engine that chooses the next best action by considering the robot's goals and constraints over the hours, days and weeks ahead. Bruno will introduce Stateful's approach, then demo the Stateful UI live: the user states what the robot should achieve over the week, and the engine works out how to do it efficiently and robustly.

Speaker #2: Tom Dean

Artificial Intelligence Consultant

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomadean/

Tom Dean is the founder of Stackstone Consulting, an AI strategy and implementation consultancy based in Oxfordshire. He helps businesses adopt AI in ways that stick — not as isolated experiments, but as part of how work actually gets done. Before founding Stackstone, Tom worked at NewOrbit Ltd as Director of Change, building processes and structures that helped teams learn through feedback and system design. That background now shapes how he approaches AI: not just as a tool, but as something that needs the right operating model around it to become genuinely useful. He now runs his consultancy as a live testbed for what agentic ways of working look like in real client and operational contexts.

Talk Title: Building an Agentic Company

Most AI talks focus on what the tools can do. This one is about what changes when AI starts to operate inside a business.

I run Stackstone Consulting with AI agents embedded into planning, communication, CRM, and day-to-day operations. In this session, I’ll show what that actually looks like in practice: where it creates leverage, where it breaks, and why those failures are often the most useful part. From email-threading mistakes to stale briefings and missed task capture, this is a grounded look at what happens when AI moves beyond personal productivity and starts taking on operational responsibility. The result is a more realistic view of what it means to build an agentic company — and where to start if you want to do the same.

Session Learning Objectives

• Understand the difference between personal AI assistant tooling and company-wide operational AI, and why that changes trust, governance, and failure modes

• See how real failure stories from an AI agent system reveal different architectural problems around context, verification, and persistence

• Learn why the first useful AI agent is often an orchestrator rather than a task automator

• Understand how to adopt AI from the periphery of an existing process, then move inward as confidence grows

• Leave with a framework for deciding where to deploy AI operationally and what infrastructure it needs to work.

Event sponsored by:

Humand Talent Solutions - Oxfordshire's leading technical recruitment business

Laburo.io - Making Redundancy Support and Outplacement services available to everyone.

Hosted by the BIPC: https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/business/business-and-intellectual-property-centre-bipc

Description supplied by the event organiser.