The event was part of Cokethorpe Enterprises’ Business Breakfast Forum series, a termly event held at Cokethorpe School near Witney.

It brings together employers, senior leaders, and the school’s network of business-owning parents for a morning of discussion, networking and fresh insight.

Leadership was the theme for this term’s forum and Witney and West Oxfordshire MP Charlie Maynard delivered the keynote address.

Mr Maynard said: “Leadership in business and in public life shares a common foundation; listening, accountability and a clear sense of purpose.

“It was a pleasure to join so many local business leaders at Cokethorpe to exchange ideas on navigating change, supporting growth and building stronger communities.”

Dr Sarah Squire, head of Cokethorpe School (Image: Cokethorpe School)

He shared perspectives from his career in international business and public life, including co-founding BDA Partners, an Asia-focused advisory firm, where he spent 24 years growing the business to more than 120 employees across nine global offices.

The event opened with a networking breakfast, followed by wider discussion around leadership, innovation and the future of business across the region.

Dr Sarah Squire, head of Cokethorpe School, said: “It was fantastic to see so many business leaders come together for this term’s forum.

“Our Business Breakfasts are hugely important to us, as a platform for businesses to connect and share insight, across learning, leadership and the local community.

“They also further inspire our pupils about opportunities in the world of work.”

The Business Breakfast Forums regularly attract major speakers from across business, politics and industry.

Previous guests have included entrepreneur, celebrity chef and musician Levi Roots and senior leaders from the agricultural and retail sectors.

Themes have ranged from leadership and disruption to artificial intelligence.

This term’s forum was sponsored by Clifton Bookkeeping, Philip Dennis Foodservice and JJ Hunt Photography.

The sessions are part of Cokethorpe’s wider efforts to build a professional network that benefits both business leaders and pupils, providing students with unique access to mentoring opportunities, workplace insights and professional connections that help bridge the gap between education and the world of work.

Cokethorpe Enterprises operates within the Cokethorpe group with a distinct commercial focus, hosting teambuilding, training, away days and weddings.

The school sits on 150 acres of Oxfordshire parkland and is an independent co-educational day school for pupils aged four to 18.

With around 600 students, it combines academic achievement with a focus on personal development, preparing young people to thrive in an ever-changing world.

John Moffat has urged the UK to move faster to help start-ups commercialise proven technology, warning that British risk aversion is pushing innovative companies towards the US.

Moffat, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Structural Battery Company, said the UK performs well in research and prototyping but falls short when companies try to turn tested technology into products that can be certified and sold at scale.

He described this stage as the main weakness in the British innovation system, arguing that the problem is not a lack of ideas but a lack of support once a technology moves beyond early development.

“The UK has many of the ingredients to lead the world in advanced technology, but we need to become better at turning innovation into commercial success.

“The critical issue is risk appetite. The UK is structurally risk-averse, especially when companies move from Technology Readiness Level 6 into commercialisation. We support research and prototypes well, but struggle to back the stage where a proven technology becomes a certified, scalable product.

“Government policy can be well-intentioned but create unintended outcomes. For example, broadening Enterprise Investment Scheme eligibility risks drawing capital away from the smaller, early-stage businesses the scheme was designed to support.

“There are only two places where start-ups can reliably access growth capital: the US and China. For companies with sensitive technology, China is not viable, which is why British companies look to the US, where funding depth and commercialisation pathways are stronger.

“Risk appetite challenges are well documented for UK start-ups in the ‘valley of death’ – the treacherous path between scale-up capital and commercial procurement. In the UK, we know the solutions to these problems. The question is whether they can be implemented with sufficient urgency and precision.”

Moffat is seeking to draw attention to the commercial barriers facing emerging technology businesses in Britain, particularly those in sectors that require long development cycles, regulatory approval and large amounts of capital before revenue can build.

Funding gap

The “valley of death” is a familiar term in the start-up market, referring to the period between technical validation and sustainable commercial sales. For many hardware and deep-tech companies, this can be the hardest stage, as investors grow more cautious and customers often wait for certification, production capacity and procurement frameworks to be in place.

Moffat said the problem is especially acute in the UK, where risk appetite remains weaker than in larger capital markets. He also pointed to the US as the main alternative for British companies seeking later-stage backing.

His intervention adds to a wider debate over how Britain can retain more of the intellectual property and industrial growth created by its universities, engineers and specialist start-ups. Founders in advanced manufacturing, aerospace, energy storage and defence-related technologies have often argued that the UK is better at generating inventions than building large companies around them.

Battery design

Moffat’s company is developing structural battery technology for unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites. The idea is to use parts of an aircraft’s structure, such as crossbeams and panels, to store electrical energy, reducing the need for separate battery packs that add weight and take up space.

The company’s Drone Spine product is aimed at heavy-lift unmanned aerial vehicles. It is designed as a high-voltage structural battery backbone that combines energy storage with a load-bearing role in the airframe.

The company said the design could allow aircraft to travel further and carry more payload by making the battery part of the structure rather than a standalone component. The system has been developed for unmanned aerial vehicle platforms with a maximum take-off weight of up to 600kg in quadcopter configuration and uses a 100s5p battery configuration, with 100 modules connected in series and five cells connected in parallel within each module.

That focus on integration, rather than propulsion alone, is central to Moffat’s argument for the technology.

“The limiting factor with heavy-lift drones is not propulsion, it is integration. Drone Spine is designed to solve that problem by combining structure, energy storage and high-voltage power distribution in one system.”

Strategic uses

He said the implications go beyond engineering efficiency and extend into defence and civilian operations. Demand for drones has grown quickly across military logistics, surveillance, emergency response and industrial support, increasing pressure on manufacturers to improve range, payload and endurance.

Moffat linked those pressures to the strategic value of structural energy systems, while arguing that the commercial and public-service uses could also be significant.

“With drones increasingly becoming a core component of modern warfare, as demonstrated by Ukraine’s ongoing defence against Russian invasion, advances in structural energy systems are strategically significant.

“But this is not just a military opportunity. The same technology can help drones fly further, carry more and operate for longer in applications such as wildfire response, emergency medical logistics, construction support and access to remote areas.

“Flight range, payload capacity and onboard power are becoming decisive factors in the future of uncrewed aviation. If we can make the structure of an aircraft store energy, we change what that aircraft can do.

“The real-world benefits could be transformative: medical supplies reaching critically ill or injured patients faster, small wildfires being tackled before they become major incidents, and armed forces equipped with more capable uncrewed systems that help deter conflict. These are exactly the kinds of technologies the UK should be helping to commercialise and scale.”

His remarks reflect a broader concern among founders that Britain risks losing commercially valuable technologies to overseas markets unless investors, policymakers and procurement bodies move faster to support companies after the prototype stage.

For advanced engineering businesses, the issue is not simply invention but whether enough capital and institutional backing exist to bridge the gap between a proven concept and a viable product.

Cequence Security said Anthropic, Dr. Chase Cunningham and Cequence have aligned on a behaviour-based approach to securing AI agents. It described this convergence as a shift in how the industry defines zero trust for agentic AI.

The shared view centres on a simple point: the main risk from AI agents lies not in whether they can log in, but in what they do after access is granted. The work of Anthropic, Cunningham’s research and Cequence’s AI Gateway architecture all point to controls that monitor and restrict runtime behaviour rather than relying mainly on authentication.

That marks a departure from traditional cybersecurity practice, which has focused on verifying identity at the point of entry. With autonomous software agents, the concern is that an authorised system may still carry out harmful actions, misuse APIs or remove sensitive data through approved channels.

The issue is drawing more attention as businesses move AI agents from trial environments into live operations. These systems are being used with access to internal tools, sensitive datasets and production systems, raising the stakes if an agent behaves unexpectedly or is manipulated by malicious prompts.

Cequence said this environment requires zero trust principles to be applied continuously throughout an agent’s activity. In practice, that means checking the context of each action, limiting the resources available to the agent and enforcing policy at the level of individual transactions.

Shreyans Mehta, Chief Technology Officer at Cequence Security, set out that argument directly.

“Most security teams are still trying to tackle AI risk with prompt detection and short-lived tokens – basically, really tight sign-in security. But that misses the point entirely. You can nail authentication and still get burned by an agent running amok inside the castle,” said Shreyans Mehta, Chief Technology Officer at Cequence Security.

Mehta also pointed to what he sees as broader agreement across the sector.

“Anthropic, Dr. Cunningham and Cequence all recognised early on that the gamechanger is securing agent behaviour. Seeing the whole industry pivot hard toward that truth, toward the approach we baked into the AI Gateway from day one, is the ultimate validation. It crowns the AI Gateway as the new reference architecture for the space,” he said.

Security model

Cunningham, who has published research on what he calls Agentic Zero Trust, framed the problem in similar terms. In his view, established controls focus too heavily on the “front gate” and do not address what happens once an AI system is inside a network or application environment.

“Traditional security controls focus obsessively on the front gate – who gets in. But with AI agents, the real damage happens after the front gate, through totally authorised channels,” said Dr. Chase Cunningham, a leading expert on Zero Trust security.

“You have to extend zero trust inside, to cover not just authentication, but every action an agent takes. Cequence’s AI Gateway is a huge leap toward that goal, toward getting zero trust to fully cover the AI agent threat model,” Cunningham said.

The broader technical argument is that AI agents can combine a series of individually permissible steps into harmful or unintended outcomes. Because those patterns may only become visible as they unfold, static rules or one-off login checks may not be enough to stop them.

That is why the behaviour-based model emphasises real-time monitoring and intervention. Instead of treating access approval as the main control, the system applies checks throughout the session, looking at which tools are being called, what data is being requested and whether the sequence of actions fits policy.

CIS guidance

Cequence also linked this thinking to the Model Context Protocol Companion Guide from the Centre for Internet Security. The guide adapts the CIS Controls to address risks that arise when AI agents interact with enterprise tools, systems and information, and identifies the protocol layer as an important point for governance.

According to Cequence, the guide calls for explicit tool-level permissions, audit trails for interactions and real-time protection for sensitive data. It said those ideas align with the design of its AI Gateway, which creates least-privilege agent profiles, records API activity and inspects requests and responses for sensitive information.

Mehta drew a direct link between the policy framework and implementation.

“The CIS MCP Companion Guide defines what enterprises should do; the Cequence AI Gateway operationalises it,” he said.

“The guide calls for explicit tool-level permissions, auditable interactions, and real-time sensitive data protection. AI Gateway delivers by generating least-privilege agent personas, logging every API call, and applying DLP scanning to tool requests and responses. It takes the CIS framework from theory to practice,” Mehta said.

The debate comes as security teams face a faster threat environment shaped by AI on both sides. Cequence argued that attack timelines are shrinking sharply, making immediate visibility into API calls and data flows more important as organisations deploy agents into business processes.

Cequence said its platform protects more than 10 billion daily API interactions and 4 billion user accounts.