The City CIO Club Dinner: AI ROI - Separating Returns from Rhetoric

​AI ROI: Separating Returns from Rhetoric City CIO Club Dinner · Wednesday 22 April 2026 · City of London

​Most organisations are now spending heavily on AI but very few can point to a commercial return that would survive scrutiny at board level. The investment is visible, the income is not, and the gap between the two is widening faster than most leadership teams realise.

​At the same time, a smaller group of technology leaders are already extracting tens of millions in value, not from pilots or proof-of-concept projects but from hard decisions about vendor relationships, workforce structure and the capability they can now build in-house for a fraction of what it used to cost. They are renegotiating contracts, replacing embedded platforms and redeploying capital at a pace that is catching the rest of the market off guard.

​This dinner brings together senior technology leaders from across the City to examine what separates the organisations generating genuine returns from those still running experiments. Where the real ROI is coming from, what the obstacles are to scaling it and why so many AI investments are failing to land commercially even when the technology works.

​Our speaker is Azeem Akhtar, CTO of BT Global Services, who will open the conversation with a practitioner's perspective on what it takes to move AI from cost centre to competitive advantage at enterprise scale.

​The evening runs under Chatham House rules with no vendor presentations and no sponsored content. Research and briefing materials are provided by The Executive Summary.