Dinner 5 - Manchester

The invitation was explicit about what the evening would not be. Not an "AI 101." Not a vendor pitch. The theme of CLIC's fifth dinner was "leading a commercial team when the profession is changing under your feet" — and, as the framing put it, the conversation worth having is about what you do about that, not what the technology does.

Around a dozen senior commercial leaders gathered at Malmaison Piccadilly in Manchester in April 2026, drawn from main contractors, consultancies and specialist firms — part of a CLIC community that had by then grown to around sixty people, adding four or five a week. The evening was built around three uncomfortable questions: what discipline are you holding yourself to, do you actually know what your team is doing, and what calls have you been avoiding?

AI where it already lives — in the day job

This was a mixed room by design, heavy AI users sitting alongside people who don't touch it, and the value was in the specifics. One member described their team running procurement through an AI system overnight — feeding in enquiries and receiving comprehensive, market-tested price lists by morning. Others talked through contract review, document drafting, and using AI in commercial assessments and dispute analysis.

The shared conviction, across users and sceptics alike, was that human commercial judgement has to stay at the centre of the decision. The tools were treated as leverage, not a replacement — and the room was alert to the risk of hollowing out the junior and apprentice roles that the profession relies on to grow its own people.

The part that keeps commercial directors up at night

Governance, not capability, was the real hesitation. The biggest source of unease was data security — what happens to commercial data once it's fed into a tool, and the near-total absence of established policy around it. The conversation ranged across the impact of AI on insurance and liability, the need for clear guardrails, the ISO frameworks emerging around AI, and the mundane but real problem of personal versus enterprise subscriptions and who can see what.

The fixes the room converged on were organisational, not technical: clear AI governance policies, training at every level rather than just for the enthusiasts, and honest sharing of best practice between firms so the whole sector can adopt responsibly instead of each business learning the same hard lessons alone.

Who's really making the recommendation?

The most striking thread was a worry about trust. One member drew the analogy with search: Google's results are now dominated by whoever pays for placement rather than by quality, and the fear is that AI will travel the same road — that today's modest subscription model gives way to advertising, and the "recommendation" you get quietly tilts toward whoever paid for it. Applied to construction procurement, that's not an abstract concern. It's the difference between an objective view of the market and being steered, at a markup, toward the supplier who bought the top slot.

Looking outward

For all the caution, the fifth dinner was the most outward-looking yet. The room discussed expanding CLIC into the United States, using the connections of British commercial professionals who've made the move, with Canada held up as a market already further down that road — and a sense that North America is years behind the UK on commercial surveying, which is as much opportunity as gap. A mentorship strand was floated to match that ambition, extending the network's mentoring to support people relocating and to pair up with counterparts across the Atlantic.

The mood was warm and energetic, with members travelling long distances to be there and staying on afterwards at the pub down the road. As with every CLIC dinner, nothing left the room — and, as with every CLIC dinner, everyone left with something.

CLIC is an invitation-only network for senior commercial leaders in UK construction and infrastructure. Dinners operate under Chatham House Rules. If you lead a commercial function and want a seat at the table, apply through the site.