ICS.AI Company Day: From AI-Native to AI-Transcendent

On Friday 5th December, we brought ICS.AI together in Birmingham for our latest Company Day - choosing a central location to make it easier for our remote workforce to connect in person. It was one of those rare (and brilliant) days where we step out of delivery mode, get everyone in the same space, and focus on how we work, how we collaborate, and how we keep building momentum - together.  

A day designed for momentum  

We kicked off with a whole-company session, welcoming our newest starters and guests, and setting the tone for the afternoon. Since our October Company Day, we’ve been joined by eight new colleagues across infrastructure, engineering, marketing, data, people and partnerships - and it was fantastic to have everyone in the room as part of the wider ICS.AI story.  

From there, we moved into a sharper focus: how we continue evolving our ways of working as an AI-first organisation - building on our AI Target Operating Model (AI TOM) without getting lost in theory. The aim was simple: create practical momentum and turn ideas into usable automation and agentic capability that helps us move faster, with better quality and consistency.  

Deep-dive departmental workshops

Rather than traditional department presentations, we ran structured departmental workshops in five groups - Marketing, Sales, Delivery, Engineering, and Finance & Business Support - each led and facilitated to keep things fast, focused, and hands-on.  

Across the sessions, with one direction of travel, each group worked through: 

• Validating departmental strategy through an AI-Native lens 

• Brainstorming AI automation and agent opportunities 

• Prioritising the highest-impact ideas  

• Shaping what “AI-Native behaviours” look like in day-to-day work 

• Sharing a short playback to capture key insights and next steps  

And, importantly, we did it in an AI-first way - using a shared toolkit and collaborative digital boards, with AI as an active participant in the process.  

From AI-Native to AI-Transcendent 

A core theme throughout the day was our ambition to move beyond AI-Native to what we call AI-Transcendent – an AI-first, agent-enabled way of working that compounds productivity and velocity across the business. It’s not about replacing roles; it’s about removing friction, automating repeatable tasks, and freeing people up to do higher-value work - while staying grounded in governance and good judgement.  

Our workshops were part of that journey: taking AI TOM thinking and making it real in every department, identifying where internal automation, agents and AI-assisted workflows can give us a step-change in productivity.  

Ending with celebration

After an intensive and energising afternoon, we shifted gears for the Christmas party - an evening to celebrate as one team, reflect on an incredible year, and properly get to know colleagues we usually only see through a screen. 

With teammates travelling from Northern Ireland all the way down to Brighton, it was a real reminder of the reach - and the closeness - of the ICS.AI team, despite being distributed day-to-day.  

Fiona Watson, ICS.AI CMO shared:

Days like this matter because they remind us that velocity doesn’t come from working harder in isolation - it comes from coming together, sharing what’s working, challenging what isn’t, and building the next version of how we operate as one team. Birmingham gave us the space to collaborate, welcome new faces properly, and move forward with even more clarity and momentum.

What comes next 

The outputs from the workshops - strategic refinements, prioritised automation/agent ideas, and a shared clarity on the behaviours core to our culture - will help us keep evolving our internal AI TOM in a practical, usable way. Not slideware. Not theory. Just the next steps that make us faster, sharper, and more consistent. 

And if Friday proved anything, it’s this: when we get ICS.AI in one place, we don’t just reconnect - we accelerate. 

Finally, a huge thank you to the University of Birmingham for hosting us - the event space was the perfect setting for focused workshops, great conversations, and a proper end-of-year celebration. 

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