Role: CEO, Beyond
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Rebranding as Beyond [from Qodea] and proving we can operate at the scale that comes with it, we are now Europe’s largest dedicated Google Cloud partner, with engineering talent spanning Europe, North America and a fast-growing team in Argentina and the Philippines. The acquisitions that got us here have integrated cleanly, which is rarer than people think.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026.
Move beyond pilots. We have seen thousands of AI proof-of-concepts across the industry and almost none go live. 2026 is about turning that into real, scaled, revenue-generating deployments for clients, not more PoCs.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Finding enough genuinely experienced AI engineers. Ask anyone how many engineers they have with three years of hands-on AI experience and the honest answer is zero – we are all competing for a tiny, immature talent pool…..and we are winning!
Is AI being over-hyped?
The technology isn’t overhyped, but the timelines are. People were promised transformation overnight; the reality is this is a multi-year unwind of decades of legacy complexity. The age of experimentation is ending: the market now wants material value and measurable outcomes, not more pilots.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
Qody – an AI-powered scheduling and resourcing tool our own engineers built from scratch in three weeks to replace a long-standing SaaS licence. It’s live, it runs our business, and it proved to our own sceptics what’s now possible when you trust the technology and the people using it.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
One of the biggest shifts over the next five years will come from agentic AI – businesses moving beyond basic automation into systems that make decisions, take actions and reshape customer and operational journeys in real time. That raises the bar for the channel: clients will need partners with the engineering depth to deploy this safely, at scale, and with clear commercial value.
Which tech gizmo could you not function without?
Gemini, hands down. I drop financial documents into it daily to summarise changes and flag what I need to worry about. I can move so much quicker with it by my side.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
• William Wallace – Scottish leadership forged under impossible pressure
• Elsie Inglis – Scottish surgeon who built field hospitals across WWI Europe after being told to go home
• Tom Ford – for the style, the wit, and a completely different kind of conversation
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
“Impatient by design, moves fast, expects the same.”
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google and Alphabet) – He’s backing Google’s AI bet with real capital, nearly $185bn in 2026, up from $31bn just four years ago, and his long-stated vision of an everyday AI assistant (first set out in 2016) is now close to reality. A useful example of a long-term bet paying off, which is exactly the kind of leadership I admire most in Google.
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