National Inclusion Week 2026: Who is missing from the room where your AI decisions are made?
By Hayley Watson, PHD – Head of AI at Corndel
There are critical, foundational questions we mustn't overlook when implementing AI in a business: who is this system really for? Who benefits from it, and who carries the cost if it does not work as intended?
I trained as a sociologist, exploring where emerging technology meets security in everyday life, and asking those questions was my job. It is not the usual route into leading AI. As Head of AI at Corndel, working alongside our technical experts and colleagues across the organisation, I find those questions matter more than ever and they are a critical part of successful AI transformation.
This year's National Inclusion Week theme is Build Trust, Navigate Change. It is also a fair description of what adopting AI is asking of most organisations right now: earn people's trust at the very moment everything about how they work is changing.
The knowledge that decides whether an AI project survives beyond a proof of concept sits with the people doing the job, not with the people building the tool. Building the underlying technology still takes deep technical expertise and always will. Deploying it well takes a different kind of knowledge: how the work actually gets done, where the judgement sits in a process, wider dependencies, the small steps people depend on. Widening the room means bringing those perspectives into the conversation early. It means involving the people who will use the technology, the people responsible for governance and risk, and the people who understand how work happens in practice.
Who is in the room shapes what gets built. We’re applying this principle in our work at Corndel. When building AI products, our team takes deliberate steps to keep design, deployment and change inclusive. We design sociotechnically: people, workflow and technology are shaped together, and the tool never comes first.
In a recent design process, colleagues from right across the organisation shaped a new product across several working sessions, bringing pedagogy, accessibility, safeguarding, privacy, and ethical and secure design into the room with them. These are not buzzwords. They are decisions about how the AI behaves, and how it behaves is what a user actually experiences. Get those decisions wrong and an employee may gain access to AI, but not AI that helps them succeed.
This is bigger than encouraging everyone to use AI. If you have never thought of yourself as technical, you can still build with these tools. You can go further than that: sit in the design and deployment decisions, shape how a system behaves, and lead AI work in your team or beyond. Some of the most valuable contributions come from people who understand customers, learners, operations, governance or communication rather than technology itself.
Trust comes from participation. People invest more in systems they had a hand in shaping, which is why widening the room early costs far less than rebuilding confidence afterwards.
So, this National Inclusion Week, here’s my ask to you: if a decision about AI is being made near you, ask to be in the room. If you are already in the room, or leading the conversation, ask who is missing.