Role: CEO, ARO
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Being handed the CEO baton of ARO from Richard Burke. It’s a great company with a great culture, great people and technology, and loyal customers. It’s going to be game changing.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
2026 is all about bringing a unified GTM across all areas of our business in managed services, our sovereign data centre facilities, expand our telecoms business and ensure our customers can navigate the challenging times with our energy consultants. All whilst streamlining our strategic partners to allow us to grow organically and cross sell even better to help solve our customers’ problems. Simultaneously, we are building out a Scotland regional focus and looking at strategic M&A if it makes sense.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Nothing really. I believe if you have a great team who you trust, you can navigate any challenge that comes your way and it’s important to sleep well or you don’t think with clarity.
Is AI being over-hyped?
No I don’t think so – it’s a paradigm shift and will change how everyone operates over the next decade except for possibly Electricians and Plumbers – though I believe it’s not just as easy as everyone thinks to implement at scale. Your data needs significant work and any company who says their data is as clean as a whistle is fooling themselves. We intend to take our AI strategy to improve efficiencies and speed of execution and have our valued staff focus on different things to make our customers even happier so we can enable even more profitable growth.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
We have used Claude to build out a GTM Hub to publicise our services, train and enable our sales teams and specialists to create consistent messaging reinforced with a series of tests. Something that would have taken 6 months previously but we achieved it in 5 days.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Not going to say it’s a surprising prediction though I think there will be continued consolidation of telecoms and technology customers and cross sell with less point solutions. Customers want outcomes not point solutions – insurance will start to form a bigger part of the telecoms/technology outcome story for customers in the future. AI evolution is going to be critical to this new world model.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
Sadly, it’s my 2 Phones and AirPods for numerous Teams calls.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Nikolai Tesla, Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, and the 14th Dalai Lama. That would be an interesting dinner to solve some very big world problems.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
The Enigma.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Jensen Huang for his perseverance on Nvidia and the fact his story has not been easy and he seems like a very balanced human who has high:
IE – intelligence Quotient
EQ -Emotional Quotient
RQ -Resilience Quotient and
LQ -Likeability Quotient
A very rare quality combination.
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