Role: CEO, Forge Technologies
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Closing out our year end in March and hitting another milestone target of 70% year-on-year revenue growth. In a market where a lot of businesses are making layoffs and cuts, we are growing.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
Getting more of our clients to move beyond AI as a concept and into agentic AI in practice with real, measurable ROI. We want to be the partner that turns the promise into proof.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
Talent. Finding people who are exceptional, not just technically strong but genuinely curious and client obsessed, in a market where everyone is competing for the same small pool. Growth is easy to plan; hiring the right people to deliver it isn’t.
Is AI being over-hyped?
If anything it’s underplayed. The technology is advancing faster than most boardrooms are moving. The bottleneck isn’t capability, it’s people willing to embrace the change. The businesses that lean in now are going to have a compounding advantage that will be very difficult to close in five years’ time.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
At our annual golf day at The Belfry, the team built an AI caddie with real-time scoring, course hints, and club suggestions for each hole. It meant my score was only appalling rather than shocking, which I’m counting as a win. More seriously, it showed how quickly a well-motivated team can go from idea to working product when the barriers to building with AI are this low.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Within five years, the channel partners who haven’t embedded agentic AI into their own operations will struggle to survive not because clients demand it, but because the efficiency gap versus those who have will, make them uncompetitive on price and speed.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
My Garmin. I’m mildly obsessed with the data it gives me on my sleep, recovery, training and feeding that into LLMs for analysis.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Elon Musk as I’m fascinated to understand how his brain actually works; the way he thinks about things and what he thinks is really coming next. Travis Rice, because I’m a huge snowboarding fan. And the author David Eddings as I grew up reading his books so it would be really interesting to understand the back story and where he got the ideas from.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
“Will challenge your assumptions. Repeatedly. And probably be direct about it.”
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Our own Director of Data and AI, Caleb Mahon. Watching him operate at the pace he does across the breadth of what he’s building and the impact it’s having for clients is impressive.
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