Role: CEO, Celerity
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Winning an award for IBM’s best Select Territory Partner in the UK. To win this award from our foundation vendor partner is both humbling and exciting for the future, plus being great recognition of the work my team have done with IBM in the past 12 months.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
We are continuing our M&A journey, looking at more businesses that give Celerity further technical expertise or wider customer reach. It’s always exciting bringing new skills and ideas into Celerity, and making Celerity a great place to work for our new acquired people remains a key focus.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
I am sure this is a well-used answer, but AI. AI’s impact on business overall and Celerity in particular is multi-dimensional, and my thoughts are a mix of how to we ensure we are moving quickly enough to transform to not get left behind, how do we evolve our services to embed AI and how do I ensure that my teams are given the AI tools to remain relevant.
Is AI being over-hyped?
I think over-hyped is the wrong word. AI is without doubt transformational, but I think some of the doom-laden predictions have been overstated. It is already changing the world, and will continue to do so, but humans have always shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in these times of fundamental change, and I believe this will happen again.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
Celerity have embedded agentic employees in all our technical teams, and they are now being used to both increase efficiency and improve service for our customers. I see this as most successful as it is getting all of our technical staff using AI, and it is taking away the fear.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Distributors will transform into marketplace-based service providers delivering value-added services, and will continue to be essential for a fully functioning IT channel. This has been talked about for any number of years, and now has to be delivered.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
My digital paper tablet. I am a copious note taker, and having used so many notebooks over the years, the ability now to be able to find notes from months/years ago is a game changer for me.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Andy Murray, Lou Gerstner, Sharleen Spiteri.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Don’t bring problems here, bring ideas or else.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive of IBM, has managed to remain on the right side of the US, Trump-led, government, has led the conversation around AI and quantum, and has continued to transform IBM into a software-led Hybrid Cloud data and AI company. To enable and increase IBM’s relevance in these turbulent times, is true leadership.
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