Role: Executive Vice President of Sales, EMEA, AHEAD
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Working with AHEAD clients to help define their AI strategy and ultimately building solutions that have real business impact. Our team is uniquely positioned to align with the leaders in industry, supported by leading consultants and implementation teams to earn the trust of the C-Suite in their AI journey.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
Focusing on expanding our global presence by further building out our regional teams with a strong customer centric culture and top technical talent to differentiate ourselves in the market.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
External market and economic pressures I would have to say. These are exciting times, but times where you have to stay on top of numerous factors outside of your control to support decision making.
Is AI being over-hyped?
Speaking solely based on potential transformational impact to enterprises, we think not. We believe that we are still in the early innings, but the technology is improving at a faster rate than anything we’ve ever seen. Our outlook on AI is very favourable, but we expect enterprise adoption to move slower than the pace of innovation.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
AHEAD treats itself as client zero for AI, so we leverage our engineering depth to experiment constantly on ways to improve our own business. In our most ambitious project to date, we have built our own agentic platform focused on business process reengineering rather than productivity. This is changing the way we work across systems and unlocking new operating leverage and revenue opportunities.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Successful UK partners will derive their business valuation almost entirely from their customers and their own intellectual property rather than the technology accreditations they carry from vendors. Vendors will therefore see strategic alignment with key partners more consequential than ever before and create stronger relationships for the benefit of customers.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
It’s boring, but I would have to say smartphone – work access, security authentication and keeping in touch with friends and family while on the move.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Trevor McDonald, Richard Harris and Oprah Winfrey.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Embrace feedback; I do!
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
There are a number of figureheads out there, but if I was to pick one I guess it would have to be Demis Hassabis at the moment with his breakthrough work – his teams continue to clearly push the boundaries.
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