Role: CEO, Natilik
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Celebrating our 20-year anniversary! We are very proud of our 20 years of consecutive, profitable, organic growth and what we have built so far. Lots more to come!
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
Further harnessing the power of AI and automation internally and externally to provide frictionless client experience and provide more productivity gains. There is so much opportunity on both fronts.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Making sure we have happy clients and people. For clients, ensuring our proposition is valuable and differentiated helping them achieve their outcomes. For people, making sure we continue to provide an amazing place to work, offer continuous development and place real value on reward/recognition.
Is AI being over-hyped?
No, because there are now plenty of proof points where assistive AI, partial Agentic or full Agentic are having a significant impact. However, because any solution that helps increase revenue, reduce cost, improve security, improve productivity or improve experience is being branded AI, that may result in the term AI being overused.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
Natilik has reduced its average time to resolution for clients through our global managed services team by 60% and elevated it’s services NPS score to 82 over the past 12 months. We have achieved this by continuing to invest in growing our engineering teams and by supporting these experts with the power of AI & automation. Integrating our observability platform, ITSM platform and client portal has provided the foundation for huge AI/automation gains across case management, self service, alert automation, dynamic asset insights, task assignment, service reporting and more.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Evolve or disappear. Maybe this has always been the case but the pace of change means that how you got here will likely not get you to your next destination and certainly not in the same way. Whether that is becoming more of a specialist rather than a generalist, narrowing on a specific niche market/tech stack or changing your go to market models. I think longer term clients won’t just allow margin gains for partners from using AI and automation and these will soon become table stakes with cost expectations tightening accordingly.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
Outside of the predictable Claude Co-Work……Garmin Forunner to remind me I should be doing some exercise.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
- Mathew Syed because I think he is an interesting bloke and I could also play table tennis against him after dinner.
- Jacinda Ardern as a great critical thinker and would critique my ropey cooking wonderfully.
- Steve Jobs, how would he have fared in the AI era?
The combination of all three would make for some interesting tension and conflicting views on many topics!
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
‘Remove immediately if found on the Natilik annual Kick Off party dance floor. Side effects include an over reliance on the same terrible dance moves.’
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Michael Truell, the CEO of Cursor AI. A 25-year-old, with no start up experience, who founded the fastest growing SaaS company of all time! Revenue doubling every couple of months. Loved by engineering teams globally, including Natilik. Impactful evidence of AI and automation in practice resulting in crazy growth. Hats off to him and his co-founders.
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