The AI in Practice Summit ran for 18 hours straight on 2 June 2026, a free virtual event hosted by The Firm. Seventeen sessions, around 1,786 registrants, opening in Australia and closing in the UK. Most attendees dropped in for the sessions that suited their timezone and saved the rest for later.
Lorraine Ellison did not. A UK-based practice owner, she joined at midnight on Monday, catching the Australian opening from her side of the world, and stayed through until 6pm on Tuesday. One sitting. One twenty-minute nod-off at 5.20am, which she filed under "a strategic reboot rather than sleep."
"I was in my element," she wrote afterwards.
What makes her account worth reading is not the stamina. It is what a practitioner of 19 years took away from an event she expected to teach her very little.
The attendee who usually learns nothing new
Ellison runs her own practice and has done for nearly two decades. She loves learning. The problem, she explained, is that most events no longer reach her.
"Often it's just one or two snippets from a session," she said. "And quite often, I conclude that I've learned nothing new, mainly because I've been running my practice for 19 years and have already learned things the hard way."
This was the exception. Session after session, she kept finding material she had never seen. The content was deliberately practical: vibe coding, Model Context Protocol, product requirement documents, Lovable, building an app, building a pricing tool.
"This was not theory," she wrote. "It was practical, hands-on learning about how AI tools can be used to build, test, improve and rethink the way we work."
It also reconnected her with something older. Ellison holds a BTEC in computer programming, her project was a program that printed a payslip, and an O Level in Computer Studies earned despite reaching the school's single computer roughly once in two years. The summit, she said, satisfied a curiosity she had carried for decades.
Why live, and why in full
Her decision to watch all 18 hours live came down to two things she knows about herself and the job.
The first is the recordings problem. "If I had saved the recordings, there is a very real chance they would have joined the excellent resources I fully intend to watch one day pile." Most practitioners have that pile. It rarely shrinks.
The second is that practice life resists planning. "Life has a habit of interfering with neatly planned CPD, especially when your parents keep adding falls and hospital visits into the diary." Live was the version that would actually happen, so she committed to it.
Cost shaped the decision too, and it is worth noting. The event was free. By her reckoning, a comparable paid event would have run around £450, a price at which she would have stayed home. At a member rate of roughly £120, she would have paid and attended. Because this one was open, she has been forwarding the link to her professional peers and pointing them to the speakers and content.
The plan that changed
The most telling outcome was not a skill. It was a shift in ambition.
At 61, Ellison had been building a plan to delegate more so she could reduce her working hours. Sensible, for someone two decades into running a firm. By the end of the summit, the plan read differently.
"I was working on my delegate to reduce my working hours plan," she said. "Now it's delegate so I can create 10 apps."
The first build will wait. She has client work on and nine new clients in six weeks, and they come first. But the goal is now in the diary, and she suspects it may be what finally motivates her to clear the workload faster.
The session that surprised her
Asked to name a favourite, Ellison went straight to one: Mark Wickersham's session.
That surprised even her. "I expected to hear stuff I already knew, or had heard through the earlier 16 sessions," she said. It was neither, and it landed as her clear number one.
She is still working through her notes and may settle on a top three. For now, Wickersham's is the one at the top.
What it signals for firms
Ellison has organised a virtual event herself, a six-hour conference during lockdown, so she has a clear sense of what 18 hours of live content costs to produce. Her verdict was unambiguous.
"It has been the most rewarding conference, webinar or event I have ever attended. Ever."
For a profession where experienced practitioners have quietly accepted that most events are refreshers, that is the part worth sitting with. The value here was not novelty for its own sake. It was being shown, step by step, what is now possible to build, and being handed the tools to start. When that lands with someone 19 years in, the recordings deserve a place in the diary rather than the someday pile.
The summit was not only for the builders. As Ellison put it, "AI is here, so it's useful to know more about how to handle it." Alongside the hands-on sessions, the agenda covered data security and how to use tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot safely. Whether you want to build apps or simply use AI well, there is something on the list for you.
Watch the replay
You can watch all 17 sessions and see every key takeaway through the link below. Take it at your own pace, or follow Lorraine's lead and watch the lot in one sitting.
Explore the summit: key takeaways, actions and all 17 replays →
