Dr Diane Tippett: Making AI Work Inside the Business

Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence in business is about models and tools. Far less is about the people who make those tools part of how a company actually works: designing the workflows, setting the guardrails and teaching colleagues to use them well. Dr Diane Tippett, Product Enablement Lead at the legal AI company Luminance, has built her career in that space. She is a nominee in the Artificial Intelligence category of the TPC Awards 2026.

Building structure where there was none

A pattern runs through Tippett's career: she joins an organisation at the point where a function does not yet exist, and builds it. Before Luminance, she was one of the founding members of the Strategic Pursuits function at Exodigo, the underground mapping technology company, helping to create the structures and strategy it used to compete for complex, high-value infrastructure contracts in markets around the world.

According to her nomination, she contributed to more than 100 strategic proposals there, with a 67% win rate, more than £9.4 million in directly attributable revenue, and framework awards representing more than £2.2 billion in annual opportunity.

Her academic background is less conventional for the field. Tippett holds a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Sydney, training she credits with the qualitative analysis, strategic problem-solving and judgement needed to make high-stakes decisions in complex, ambiguous environments.

Product Enablement at Luminance

Tippett was recruited to Luminance to establish a new Product Enablement function: the work of making sure customers, and the company's own teams, understand the product and get full value from it. Her remit has since grown to include responsible agentic AI, product intelligence, customer insight and organisational automation.

She now builds and deploys AI systems across Luminance's Product, Engineering and go-to-market teams. Her nomination describes agentic workflows spanning customer intelligence, product knowledge, engineering triage, AI-assisted product development and customer-facing education.

Responsible by design

The word that recurs in Tippett's work is "responsible". Agentic AI, in which systems carry out multi-step tasks with a degree of autonomy, raises obvious questions about oversight and reliability, especially for a company whose customers are lawyers and legal teams. Her approach is to build those safeguards into the workflow itself rather than add them afterwards.

Alongside the systems, she mentors colleagues to develop their own AI capability, so that the knowledge does not sit with one person or one team.

Tippett's case rests on a rare combination: a record of commercial results in complex bidding, and hands-on work making AI useful, and safe, inside a fast-growing company.

Dr Diane Tippett is a nominee in the Artificial Intelligence category of the TPC Awards 2026. Figures are as provided in the nomination.