Omni Dinner Abu Dhabi

Restaurant - Talea - Abu Dhabi

10/12/2025 7:00 pm

Beyond the AI Hype: What Actually Works When You're Past the Pilot

Business

This isn't another networking event

Your vendor promised AI transformation in three months. You’re six months in and your team still prefers the old system. The demo was beautiful, the pilot showed promise, but now you’re discovering that AI is spectacular at conferences and spectacularly complicated in reality – and every leader in this room knows exactly what that disconnect feels like. This is the Omni Dinner Table, where ten to twelve senior leaders stop pretending AI implementation is easy and start wrestling with the questions that actually matter: what separates AI theater from actual value? How do you get teams to trust outputs when the black box makes mistakes? When do you stop the pilot and admit this particular tool isn’t the answer? What are the leaders who’ve actually scaled AI past the proof-of-concept doing differently? You’ll leave with frameworks for evaluating what’s real versus what’s hype, relationships with peers who’ve lived through failed implementations and successful ones, and strategic clarity about where to invest your next AI dollar. This isn’t another session about AI’s potential. This is peer wisdom from people who’ve moved past the pitch deck into the messy reality of making it work. Connection over noise. Implementation over inspiration. Honest conversation about failure over polished case studies.

The evening's flow

This isn’t another networking event Your vendor promised AI transformation in three months. You’re six months in and your team still prefers the old system. The demo was beautiful, the pilot showed promise, but now you’re discovering that AI is spectacular at conferences and spectacularly complicated in reality – and every leader in this room knows exactly what that disconnect feels like. This is the Omni Dinner Table, where ten to twelve senior leaders stop pretending AI implementation is easy and start wrestling with the questions that actually matter: what separates AI theater from actual value? How do you get teams to trust outputs when the black box makes mistakes? When do you stop the pilot and admit this particular tool isn’t the answer? What are the leaders who’ve actually scaled AI past the proof-of-concept doing differently? You’ll leave with frameworks for evaluating what’s real versus what’s hype, relationships with peers who’ve lived through failed implementations and successful ones, and strategic clarity about where to invest your next AI dollar. This isn’t another session about AI’s potential. This is peer wisdom from people who’ve moved past the pitch deck into the messy reality of making it work. Connection over noise. Implementation over inspiration. Honest conversation about failure over polished case studies. The evening’s flow The evening begins at 18:30 with arrival and structured networking designed to break the awkward barrier before you’ve even ordered a drink, with conversation prompts specific to tonight’s theme and personal introductions from me the moment you walk in because walking into a room of strangers shouldn’t feel like work. By 19:15 we gather for my ten-minute opening provocation – not a lecture but a bold perspective on why most AI implementations fail designed to make you think “wait, are we making these exact mistakes right now?” and spark the kind of reaction that lights the evening on fire. At 19:25 dinner begins and three courses unfold over two hours with facilitated discussions woven throughout, exploring where you’ve seen AI deliver genuine value versus where it created more problems than it solved, what actually changes when you try to scale a successful pilot across the organization, and how cultural resistance shows up differently across teams and markets when AI threatens established ways of working. I guide conversation through rotating themes every twenty to twenty-five minutes so everyone participates, everyone contributes, and no one dominates, while dropping two to three provocative ninety-second perspectives throughout dinner that challenge the comfortable narratives vendors and consultants have sold us about AI transformation. At 21:15 dessert arrives and we shift to open networking where connections solidify, follow-ups get planned, WhatsApp groups form, and the real magic happens in the margins. Some stay until 22:00, others linger until 22:30, your choice entirely.

Who you'll meet

We don’t let just anyone register because the quality of your evening depends entirely on who’s sitting beside you, so every Omni Dinner Table is carefully curated to ensure you’re in the room with people different enough to bring perspectives you haven’t considered and similar enough to understand your complexity without needing an hour of context. You’ll join ten to twelve senior leaders – chief experience officers, chief digital officers, VPs, and heads of customer experience, technology, innovation, or digital transformation – who’ve all spent at least a decade leading change initiatives and making technology investment decisions that actually move the organization forward or set it back millions. Most have worked across international markets or led teams across cultures, bringing hard-won wisdom about what works when you’re implementing AI in Dubai versus what works in Singapore versus what absolutely doesn’t translate from Silicon Valley case studies to Middle Eastern enterprise reality. No direct competitors, maximum two people from similar industries, and we deliberately mix leaders who’ve successfully scaled AI implementations with those currently stuck in pilot purgatory to create what we call asymmetric value where everyone learns from someone who’s solved what they’re wrestling with and everyone shares battle scars with someone just beginning to discover how hard this actually is. This isn’t accidental, this is intentional curation, and it’s why people remember these dinners six months later.

What's Included

Curated group of 10-12 senior customer experience and market expansion leaders
Private dining room
Three-course dinner with wine pairings
Expert facilitation by someone who's actually built customer centricity across continents and cultures
Discussing frameworks on cultural adaptation and local market experience design
Post-event connection facilitation and follow-up introductions
Access to the Vivencia global community
Implementation resources you can use Monday morning

Why Omni Dinners Tables are different

Pure peer learning from leaders wrestling with real cultural complexity - zero vendor pitches, zero sponsored agendas
Intimate enough for the vulnerable conversations about failure that never happen at conferences (never more than twelve)
Facilitated by someone who's spent decades navigating customer experience across cultures, not a moderator reading questions off cards
International perspectives in the room - people who've succeeded and failed in markets from Southeast Asia to the Middle East to Europe
Carefully curated so you're learning from people who've solved what you're struggling with and teaching people who need what you've figured out
Real strategy dialogue over polished case studies, genuine relationships over business card exchanges
An evening that changes how you think about cultural adaptation, not another forgettable networking event you'll struggle to remember next month

Omni Dinner Abu Dhabi