Role: Founder, Chairman & CEO, Utilize
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Seeing the trust our customers place in us reflected in the way they’ve grown with us. Several long-standing relationships have deepened significantly this year, with businesses bringing us closer into their strategic planning rather than treating us purely as a supplier.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026?
Improve on our Best Companies rating from a 1-star to a 3-star. By working together, and focusing on improvements, we can make our company an even better place to work for everyone.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
The pace of change is relentless, and our customers are under real pressure to keep up. We see our role as cutting through the noise helping them focus on what will actually move the needle rather than chasing every new development.
Is AI being over-hyped?
The technology can genuinely deliver, but the way it’s talked about rarely matches how it actually works in practice. Real results come from applying AI to specific problems with clear goals and proper guardrails, not from getting excited about the latest product launch.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
We’re starting to see some results applying AI to support call data to pick up on customer sentiment in real time via voice and email. Rather than waiting for feedback after the fact, we can identify when a customer is becoming frustrated during a call and get the right person involved straight away. It’s still early days, but it’s already helping us catch and resolve issues faster and that immediacy makes a real difference to how customers feel about working with us.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Success in the channel over the next five years will have less to do with how broad your portfolio is and more to do with how well your customers know you. When things get complicated, people turn to whoever they trust most, and that relationship isn’t built on product catalogues.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
My phone, but not for the reasons you might expect. Without it I can’t authenticate into anything, so in a world built on strict security, it’s become the key that unlocks everything else.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
I can’t answer this seriously so it’s got to be Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill, with John Cleese to commentate. The first two would be at each other before the starters arrived, and Cleese would spend the whole evening making it worse while pretending to be the voice of reason.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
“No fluff, no jargon, no waffle.” Too many businesses in this industry tell customers what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. We’d always rather have an honest conversation, even an awkward one, than say all the right things and underdeliver. Our customers deserve better than that.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Elon Musk, reluctantly. The SpaceX IPO was an eyewatering number by any measure, and pulling that off while running several other companies simultaneously is either genius or madness, possibly both. As a business story it’s hard to look away, even when you want to.
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