From POCs to Production Webinar: The AI Skills UK Companies Are Struggling to Hire

The details 

   Thursday 12th March 2026

 12.30-13.30PM

Online via MS Teams 

This expert-led webinar will explore the practical challenges organisations face when moving AI from proof of concept into reliable, scalable production systems, and the skills gaps that most often stall progress.

We will look at why so many promising AI projects stall after the POC phase, even when the models are strong, and what is typically going wrong behind the scenes. This often includes hiring the wrong profiles too early, gaps in data and infrastructure, and a lack of clear ownership once systems need to operate in the real world.

Hosted as a short, practical session, this webinar will bring together practitioners and leaders working at the intersection of AI delivery, engineering, and hiring to share clear insight into what is working, what is not, and how teams are building AI capability that scales beyond demos.


What you'll learn

  • The difference between research, platform, and MLOps talent and when each is truly needed

  • The most common data and infrastructure challenges that slow or block production
  • Why strong models don’t always translate into production success
  • What people who’ve genuinely shipped AI tend to look like in real teams, not just on CVs
  • How UK organisations are structuring teams to move beyond POCs

 

Who should attend

This session will be relevant for:

  • AI Leads and Heads of AI
  • Engineering, Data, and Platform leaders
  • Scale-ups and enterprises building production-grade AI capability

 

 

Register your space now

Our Host

webinar - jake 2
Host
Jake Rickman
Senior Recruitment Consultant,
AI, ML & Data Science
 

"I work closely with AI and engineering leaders to help them build teams that can take models out of the lab and into production — focusing on the skills that actually make systems ship and scale."

jake@talentlocker.co.uk

 

Our expert speaker

George H
Speaker
George Hartshorn
Head of Data Science, AI & ML
 

George Hartshorn is an AI and ML leader with over 15 years of experience in data science, currently heading up the AI, Machine Learning and Data Science department at Flutter. He has spent his career building and deploying AI products, from LLM applications to large-scale ML pipelines.

Untitled design (9)-1