Alex Papaioannou
Founder, Narrative Edge Group
Alex founded Narrative Edge Group to equip people to direct AI systems and stay answerable for the work. Every step before it pointed at the same job: making complex, high-stakes material land with people who have something to lose.
Banking
Alex was a private banker at UBS Wealth Management from 2005 to 2009, providing regulated, compliance-focused advice to UK entrepreneurs with between £5 million and £50 million to invest.
Compliance as the starting point, not a check at the end.
Training senior teams
Since 2013 he has delivered training for senior teams as a specialist associate for leading training consultancies, into clients including Barclays, EY, UBS, Coutts, Volkswagen and Springer Nature. Alongside delivery he designed simulations, wrote scripts and programme content, and ran projects end to end.
For Springer Nature he hosted a three-part podcast on enterprise AI, briefing senior executives and interviewing one of their heads of AI.
Designing for the room as it is, not as the brief imagines it.
Building with AI
In 2024 he co-founded Brain Man VR, an AI ed-tech start-up, and took it to MVP and pilots through the AI Forge accelerator as Chief Strategy Officer. He builds with these systems himself, from agentic workflows to a citation-locked retrieval system over a media archive (now in development).
Teaching from inside the tools, not from a description of them.
The room
Alex has been a professional actor since 2011, with a speciality in immersive theatre, where the audience works inside the story rather than watching it. That is where the Live Lab's method comes from: executives step inside a simulation of their own work, built to feel real.
His classical credits include numerous Shakespeare roles, most recently the title role in Macbeth for Action to the Word in Hong Kong and Singapore in 2024.
People adopt a future they have already worked in.
Where it started
He holds a BSc in Microbiology from Nottingham, and began in science and current affairs documentary production, working with independent producers on programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery.
Turning research into a story an audience will follow.