Craig Hepburn.

Craig Hepburn is an AI strategist and Perplexity Fellow, former Chief Digital Officer at UEFA and Art Basel, and CEO of 1706 Studio.

Craig Hepburn is an AI strategist, Perplexity Fellow, and CEO of 1706 Studio, a studio in London and Glasgow that teaches leadership teams AI, then builds the agent systems and operating models with them. He spent twenty five years in senior digital roles at Microsoft, Nokia, Art Basel and UEFA. As UEFA's Chief Digital Officer he built the digital team, launched the UEFA.tv streaming platform, and ran the Innovation Hub. He now works with senior executives and business leaders across industries on agentic AI: building agents, designing AI first operating models, and rethinking how organisations work. He writes Ground Truth, a publication on the economics of artificial intelligence.

Craig Hepburn is an AI strategist, Perplexity Fellow, and CEO and Founding Partner of 1706 Studio, a studio in London and Glasgow that teaches leadership teams AI, then builds the agent systems and operating models with them. The name comes from the arXiv paper that started all of this, "Attention Is All You Need".

He has spent twenty five years in senior digital leadership, at Microsoft, Nokia, Art Basel and UEFA. As UEFA's Chief Digital Officer he built the organisation's digital capability from a standing start, launched the UEFA.tv streaming platform, established the Innovation Hub, and led the partnership with Google on AI. He moved to Art Basel as Chief Digital Officer in 2023, where he put large language models into production rather than into pilots.

His argument, made consistently in his advisory work and in Ground Truth, is that no lasting advantage sits in the model itself, because every rival can buy the same model. It sits in the context an organisation owns and the way it orchestrates that context: its data, its history, its processes, its relationships. He works with senior executives and business leaders across sport, culture and industry on exactly that problem: building agents, designing new operating and business models, and helping organisations tangibly understand what this shift means for how they work and compete. And he does it with their people rather than to them.