Featuring insights from Isaac Stockwell (VP of IT, Outset Medical), Brad Haeberle (EVP Infrastructure, Siemens), and Mike Hughes (Group Service Director, Peak Scientific)
At Field Service Edge 2026, we brought three seasoned leaders onto one stage to talk about something every service organization is grappling with right now: how do you actually get an AI initiative approved?
The answers were not what most people expected.
Across all three leaders, one theme surfaced immediately: the business case itself is rarely the hard part. The harder work — the part that actually determines whether your initiative lives or dies — happens long before you ever walk into the room.
What does that look like in practice? It depends on where you sit. An IT leader has a very different version of this story than a service director. And a global infrastructure executive at a company like Siemens has learned things the hard way that most organizations are still about to find out.
A few things we can tell you came up in this session:
- Why packing out your ROI model with every detail might be the single fastest way to lose credibility in the room
- The one stakeholder most teams forget to map — and why it matters at the moment of truth
- What Brad said he would go back and tell himself, knowing what he knows now (hint: it’s not about the business case at all)
- The moment Isaac’s team realized their assumptions were going to get pressure tested — and how they prepared for it
There’s also a candid conversation about where things went wrong: friction with data, surprises around privacy compliance, and what happens when you generate too much excitement too early.
If you’re building a business case for AI in field service right now (or you’re about to), this session is required watching.
Watch the full Session 1 recording →
Field Service Edge is Aquant’s annual event for service leaders navigating AI transformation. This year, we had 10 industry speakers across the medical and industrial equipment space. Browse all sessions →