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Richard Foster-Fletcher is the author of The AI Gap: Why Enterprise AI Produces Output Without Insight and one of the UK’s leading independent researchers on how artificial intelligence changes what organisations are capable of.
He tests the latest AI systems at the limits of their reasoning, research, analysis and judgement. He works across models from leading AI labs and is regularly invited to evaluate new releases. His research examines what these advances can contribute to executive decision-making and how they expand what organisations can understand, decide and accomplish.
Richard chairs MKAI, the independent research institute he founded in 2019. Through MKAI, he publishes empirical research on AI capability, organisational judgement and the effects of deployment.
He was named among the UK’s Top 20 AI Researchers and Entrepreneurs in 2026 and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI. He has advised UK Parliament and the United Nations on AI strategy and has spoken for Salesforce, Telefónica, Oracle, Arm, LSE, Imperial College London, UCL and the University of Oxford.
His talks connect direct work with leading AI systems to the financial, strategic and organisational decisions senior leaders are now making about them.
Published Research
Foster-Fletcher, R. (2026). The First Annual Reports of the LLM Era: Language Change in 150 SEC 10-K Filings, 2019–2024. MKAI Working Paper.
Foster-Fletcher, R. (2026). Adoption Without Capability Reporting: How Major Companies Describe Enterprise AI. MKAI Working Paper.
For conference main stages, annual meetings and company events.
AI models are becoming more capable at reasoning, research and analysis, and at work that runs across many steps. This keynote explains where the leading models have reached, which developments represent a real change, and where current claims run ahead of the evidence.
It also examines the distance between the strongest models and the AI most organisations are actually running, why that distance exists, and what it costs a company to leave it there.
Senior audiences leave with a clearer view of what the technology can now do and how far their own organisation is from it.
For boards, executive committees and the P&L holders carrying commitments that depend on AI. Delivered as a closed board session or to a wider leadership audience.
Companies have made commitments to the market that depend on a level of capability being available from their AI systems. That capability may exist in the original model and still fail to survive deployment once governance and security controls are applied.
Those controls raise stability by limiting what the model produces. The teams responsible for making AI safe are rarely the same teams making commitments to the market.
That separation creates a gap between what is required from the AI and what it is permitted to do. Public documents show little evidence that companies are testing whether the system, once deployed and governed, remains capable of the work their commitments assume.
The briefing sets out why the gap opened, which functions and processes produced it, and how to trace where it is appearing. Senior leaders leave knowing which functions need to be involved, what evidence is missing, and what closing the distance between the commitment and the system would require.
Richard delivered a highly engaging and thought-provoking session for our Director As Strategic Leader programme. His ability to explain how AI reshapes organisational judgement and capability made the session immediately relevant and deeply impactful for senior leaders.
Richard delivered an insightful and thought-provoking keynote on how AI is reshaping leadership, decision-making and organisational capability. His ability to make complex ideas accessible prompted genuine discussion among senior leaders. The session sparked exactly the kind of strategic conversation our members needed.
