Prof. Shiqiang Wang speaks at Devon AI Summit 2026

Prof. Shiqiang Wang spoke today at the Devon AI Summit 2026 at Sandy Park in Exeter, giving a talk on the future of AI and what it means for businesses.

Shiqiang began with agentic AI and the iterative loop behind it: a user sets a goal, a large language model reasons and plans, the agent calls tools to gather information or take actions, and the model analyses the results before repeating the cycle or giving a final answer. Businesses already use agents across customer service, sales and marketing, operations, and software and IT. The result is that routine work gets cheap, while judgement and checking become scarce.

The talk then turned to the gap between what the tools can do and the value organisations get from them. A Microsoft study found that engineers using AI coding agents produced 24% more code, yet in a McKinsey survey only 37% of companies reported profit from AI, even though 80% of the people surveyed felt more productive. Oversight matters too: Veracode found that 44% of AI-written code failed a security test. The payoff depends on knowing what to build, checking the results, and keeping skills in house.

This is where human experts remain essential. Turning research into a working system means testing new methods to learn their limits, fitting them to an organisation’s data, rules, budget and people, and then building and verifying something its team can run. Shiqiang also set out what businesses can gain from partnering with university researchers: shared costs through public funding, skills that stay in the team, research into private, low-cost and reliable AI that vendors often skip, and early contact with future hires.

To close, Shiqiang introduced aGiTrack from our team, a free, open-source tool that records every step an AI coding agent takes, so that users can see what was done, why, and at what cost. Short courses on AI from University of Exeter executive education were also highlighted for teams looking to build their skills.

Shiqiang then joined fellow speakers on stage for a Q&A with the audience.