Closed Door Dinners: What Happens When 20 Tech Leaders Get Honest About AI in Production

What happens when you put CTOs, technical founders, and engineering leaders from some of the UK’s most ambitious technology companies around one table to talk candidly about deploying AI in production?

Last week, CodeBase and Dell Technologies brought together senior technical leaders from across the ecosystem for our latest Closed Door Dinner in Edinburgh. Hosted by experienced tech leader Olly Headey, alongside Dell’s Elliot Young and Jonathon Dey, the evening was built around a simple principle: panels create rehearsed answers, but closed doors lead to real discussions.

Beyond the AI Hype Cycle

Rather than high-level trends or polished sales pitches, the conversation focused on the practical, day-to-day realities engineering teams face right now. With AI adoption moving at breakneck speed, senior leaders are often left navigating uncharted territory without a clear playbook. Creating an off-the-record environment allowed attendees to drop the polished external narratives and dig into the actual friction points of scaling AI tools in production.

Over dinner, the discussion ranged across several pressing technical and operational challenges:

• Quality and Agentic Workflows: How to evaluate whether AI-generated output is genuinely production-ready, where agentic workflows deliver measurable value, and where they fall short.
• Engineering Risk & "Workslop": Managing prompt injection, model selection, data sovereignty, spiralling compute costs, and the rising tide of low-quality, AI-generated code entering repositories.
• Production Governance: Navigating the realities of non-engineers shipping AI-built tools, shifting risk profiles, and balancing what leaders tell their boards versus what engineering teams experience on the ground.

A Space Built for Unfiltered Peer Learning

What made the evening particularly valuable was the breadth of perspective around the table. Leaders building early-stage products sat alongside those managing large, established engineering teams across wildly different industries and stages of scale. That mix created an open, technically grounded space to compare notes on what’s working, what isn't, and the unsolved problems everyone is actively trying to work through.

As the formal dinner wrapped up, the conversation moved outdoors to the terrace for a fireside chat - complete with a real fire - to keep the discussions going late into the evening.

Ready to be in the room?

Our Closed Door Dinners are invite-only and deliberately kept small to maintain candid, high-value conversations among peers.

Whether you're a CTO, technical founder, or engineering leader navigating AI at scale, we regularly host spaces like this across the UK to help you connect with people who are solving the same problems you are.

Keep your eyes on our socials for the next one!