Role: CEO, Econocom P&S UK
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Expanding Econocom’s capability into Ireland from a solutions provider perspective with the acquisition of Image Supply Systems (ISS AV), based in Dublin. The acquisition gives us local presence in Ireland to build out our broader capability, whilst reenforcing Econocom as one of the largest AV systems integrators in Europe.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
To grow organically and through acquisition in the UK and Ireland to better serve our customers.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Where to place our bets. The nature of our business is it takes time between investing in new capability and seeing the results. Working out what’s most relevant to our customers and what’s hype is key to this to ensure we evolve our capability in line with the market and customer’s requirements.
Is AI being over-hyped?
No, I don’t think so, although it’s clearly at the top of the hype cycle currently. For me, the key is to help our customers to understand how it can benefit their business and their customers through gaining efficiencies, accelerating their go to market propositions or growing share in the market they operate in. We’re seeing a lot of proof of concepts not progress to production at the minute, but there’s also some really compelling use cases and significant return on investment opportunities.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
We’ve developed an internal tool called AI Sales Coach. It gives the teams access to all relevant collateral across the entire group so that we can gain a better understanding of what we’re doing for our customers and capability across the group. We invest a lot of time and effort in enabling and educating our teams through training, etc, but having this as a self-serve capability is incredibly useful, especially for our sales teams.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
I believe we’ll see more customers moving workloads away from the cloud providers and bring it back on-premise over the next few years, especially around AI. I think most businesses will have a hybrid strategy to a greater or lesser extent, but from a security, control & cost perspective I can see a higher percentage of workloads being on-premise.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
My mobile phone – I couldn’t do without it for work or personal life!
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Sir David Attenborough, Sir David Jason & Nelson Mandela.
If you had a warning label, what would it say
If you’re speaking to me before I’ve had a cup of tea in the morning please proceed with caution!
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Dario Amodei at Anthropic continues to impress, especially this year with the acceleration of Claude AI as a real competitor to ChatGPT. What I also like is how he’s advocating for AI safety and, whilst embracing the capabilities of AI can be of huge benefit, we should be mindful of the risks and dangers associated with its use in certain scenarios.
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