Our report, The Human Protocol, looks at the year AI stopped being a technology question and became an organisational one. In short: for regulated businesses, the bottleneck is behaviour, trust and ethics – the human protocols that decide whether AI increases risk or delivers value.
Get the full report, The Human Protocol
AI fails in the last mile
“Can we build it?” is no longer the question. The risk now is whether people will use it. As models become part of business as usual, the constraint shifts to human behaviour: decision rights, incentives and the messy reality of existing workflows.
Deploy AI without addressing the human element and you risk ‘pilot theatre’ – impressive demos that never reach production, while shadow usage grows as teams bypass official tools. The report makes the case for designing for adoption as well as deployment, and for being explicit about where the AI ends and your teams’ accountability begins.
The next shift in distribution
First came the brokers, then the aggregators and comparison sites, then trusted experts. The next wave is AI agents, and they verify claims using data they can see: compliance records, operational resilience, ESG scores. If your trust signals aren’t machine-readable, you’re filtered out before a human customer ever compares you with the competition.
The third trend is responsible change. Regulators won’t wait for failure, and they will reward credible control with speed and trust.
Regulators now measure harm across several dimensions, including exclusion, bias and climate impact. Treating ethics as a compliance checklist at the end of a transformation builds up ‘ethical debt’. The report sets out how to map your values to specific operational decisions, and how to name the non-negotiable anchor points that define who you are.
In the full report, you’ll find the three trends shaping regulated business in 2026 - adoption, the agent economy and responsible change - plus what to do about each, and how we’ve tackled them with clients like Shawbrook Bank, WTW and a major UK retail bank.
