Role: Founding Director, Butterfly Data
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
We’ve won some interesting work and some huge contracts, but I think the real high point has been seeing our customers / stakeholders become our advocates, to the point where they have referred us to do work for other government departments.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
We are growing rapidly so preserving our culture throughout that growth is the main thing we need to achieve.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
People. Thinking about problems with people, finding the right people, managing interactions between people. Building high performing teams is challenging!
Is AI being over-hyped?
Yes definitely, but it’s like the dot com boom all over again. Fortunes will be won and lost and a lot of those companies will end up worthless, but I do think it will end up transforming our lives in the way the internet did, creating new business model and jobs that didn’t exist before.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
We are using it a lot to help with finding opportunities on the various government portals and refining our response to tenders – we can paste together our past successful responses and case studies and just use AI to get the word count down. I’ve also used a partnering tool that identifies people you can team with to form consortia.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
I think we will start to see a lot of home-grown alternatives to the big tech giants – or at least I hope we will! We need a UKDB that is as scalable as Oracle…
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
My phone. I spend so much time on trains going to client site or traveling between our offices in Cardiff and Manchester, if I wasn’t able to deal with email and join calls on the move I’d be lost. I also have a ‘remarkable’ which is great for turning handwritten notes into searchable files on my Google drive – I still prefer writing when in a meeting, rather than typing.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Richard Feynman, John Maynard Keynes and Kate Martin (wife of the Aston Martin founder – he was a racing driver and she was the brains behind naming the business after the Aston hill climb to attract the right clientele)
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Watch out, plates spinning overhead.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Dario Amodei for having the integrity to turn down work that didn’t align with Anthropic’s ethics We’ve done similar (but smaller and less high-profile revenue losses).
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