London Cloud Leaders #12 – Agentic AI: From Personal Tools to Autonomous Teams

Andrew Hemming, CEO of Footprint IT, has set himself a goal: make himself redundant. Not by stepping back, but by building teams of AI agents that plan, delegate and execute work autonomously. Agents that converse with each other and with humans, hand off tasks, and take on responsibilities the way a real team would.

At this session of London Cloud Leaders, Andrew will share what Footprint IT has already built and what they've learned, including where things have gone wrong.

The question he's bringing to the room: could 60-70% of the work we do in front of a computer be handed to AI? And if so, how do we actually get there, not as a thought experiment, but inside a real organisation?

The discussion will explore two threads:

How far can we push this?

• The shift: Moving from personal AI tools (Copilot, ChatGPT) to teams of autonomous agents that collaborate and converse
• In practice: What Footprint IT has built and what it took to get there
• Disruption: Whether AI agents could displace traditional offshore development models
• Your role: How your role and your engineering team's roles may look in 12-24 months

Where are the hard limits?

• Responsibility: The philosophical question that runs underneath all of it: AI is not yet ready to take full responsibility from human beings. So where does the line sit, and who draws it?
• Ownership: Security, privacy and IP when AI has access to your source code
• Control: Running AI in secure or on-premises environments, particularly relevant for those in financial services and insurance
• Guardrails: Preventing runaway actions, and what happens when an agent gets stuck in a loop

This is an interactive roundtable for cloud, engineering and technology leaders, whether you're already running agents in production or working out where to start. The conversation will be candid about what's actually working, what isn't, and what we each need to get right before handing over more control. Including the question most leaders haven't answered yet: if AI can do 70% of engineering work, what should engineers be doing instead?

Agenda

• 5:30pm to 6:00pm – Arrival and networking
• 6:00pm to 6:15pm – Introductions
• 6:15pm to 7:00pm – Session part one
• 7:00pm to 7:10pm – Break
• 7:10pm to 7:45pm – Session part two and discussion
• 7:45pm to 8:30pm – Networking and wrap-up