Role: Co-founder and CEO, SEP2
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Reaching the 100-employee mark and celebrating our 10th anniversary were significant personal milestones for me. These achievements underscore the dedication required to scale SEP2 while remaining a truly People-Powered organisation.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
For the past year and a half, we have been dedicated to developing and implementing agentic AI into our SOC delivery. We are confident that our progress exceeds that of our competitors, and our primary goal is to establish SEP2 as the industry leader in this space.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
As an MSSP, the security of our customers is constantly at the forefront of my concerns. Therefore what keeps me up is that somewhere right now an attacker is being more patient and more diligent than the average defender. They only need to be right once. Across every customer, every night, we have to be right every time, which is exactly why we put agentic triage and human analysts on the same problem.
Is AI being over-hyped?
Rather than being over-hyped, I believe AI is widely misunderstood. Truly grasping its functionality and how it actually operates reveals it to be more transformational than any previous technology. However, that deep level of understanding is essential to making it work effectively for you. This is what we have done at SEP2 and it’s making a real impact in our business and services we provide.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
While we have implemented AI throughout our entire organisation, the initiative that brings me the most pride is our agentic AI SOC that we offer to our customers, particularly our specialised triage and detection agents. The true measure of its success lies in the outcomes rather than the technology itself. Our triage agent operates directly on the case wall alongside our human analysts, managing the constant stream of alerts. This collaboration ensures that our human experts can focus their attention where it is truly needed, on complex decisions requiring critical judgment.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
This is less a prediction than a wish. I’d love to see the channel move towards genuine collaboration between specialist partners and away from organisations ‘dabbling’ in sectors they don’t really understand. The temptation, especially as AI lowers the barrier to entry, is for everyone to claim they can do everything. But a mile wide and an inch deep doesn’t serve customers well, particularly in something as unforgiving as security. My hope is that over the next five years we stop seeing breadth as the goal and start rewarding depth: partners who are genuinely the best in their niche, working closely with other specialists rather than trying to swallow the whole stack themselves.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
My phone, which I’m not proud of. If I don’t have it to hand or the battery dies then I genuinely break out in a sweat. It’s mission control, calendar, all comms, the business in my pocket. But I hate what it’s become for me. The distraction it causes is the thing I’ve fought hardest against in 2026. I’ve been making a real effort to put it away when I’m in a meeting or actually with people. It turns out the most valuable thing the device does is teach me when not to use it. Work in progress, but I’m getting there.
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
Alan Turing, first. He effectively invented the machine I’ve built a business on, and I’d want to know what he’d make of AI agents now triaging alerts in our SOC. Then John Lewis, the man who took a thriving business he could simply have pocketed, and instead handed it to his employees. He built the John Lewis Partnership on the radical idea that the people doing the work should share in the rewards, and it was a business obsessed with providing the best service. Finally Sean Lock because two brilliant minds and a lot of big ideas need someone to puncture it all and keep the evening honest. His humour always got me. An absolute comedy genius.
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Approach with caution: may bite. Especially before coffee, and especially if you say ‘AI’ and ‘silver bullet’ in the same sentence.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
While there have been several remarkable leaders this year, particularly within the AI sector, Assaf Rappaport of Wiz is the true standout for me personally. The speed at which they built and scaled Wiz is incredibly impressive, as is the fact that they maintained such a recognisable independent brand even after a $32 billion acquisition into Google.
View the Oxygen Partner Leaders hub, powered by Giacom, here
