Role: CEO, Techary
What’s been your business high point of the last 12 months?
Without doubt, earning our place on the Sunday Times 100 for a second consecutive year. Breaking into Britain’s fastest-growing private companies once is hard but doing it two years running, against a higher qualifying bar each time, in the wider context of channel and industry growth rates, whilst being organic and not acquisitive growth, is our standout.
Name one thing your company is looking to achieve in 2026
We are doing a lot – so to pick one is tough! If we have to select one goal for 2026 it’s to have a successful launch of our proprietary software platform, that is already in production for some customers. We’re working on a migration of all of our customers, as well as a market-wide launch towards the end of the year. It will be the first insight into how we are differentiating the market, and something we will launch publicly, a first for us.
What keeps you awake at night as a partner leader?
This could be a comprehensive list! The pace of change and our ability to adapt is probably the biggest thing here. Our industry is moving at a pace where if you standstill, you are instantly behind, and it’s a mountain to climb to keep up with progress. This requires a balance between risk and reward, as well as needing to have a great core business.
Is AI being over-hyped?
There’s a difference between AI hype and AI in production and that gap is widening fast. We get a fairly unique view: some clients have run ML at an advanced level for a decade, while others don’t yet have an agentic chat tool in the building. So no, I don’t think the technology is over-hyped. It’s a permanent shift in how people work.
What does concern me is the public-market AI race, where valuations are running well ahead of the value actually being delivered and adopted across the masses (SMBs are so far behind). It feels like the cyber revolution #2. It took years for the average UK business to understand the risk, and then move to adoption of technology. With AI, and the pace of evolution, it cannot take as long.
What’s been your most successful internal AI project to date, and why?
I’ll keep the roadmap close, but the one I’m proudest of is also the simplest to state: we’ve put multiple agentic AI tools into production for every user at Techary, not a pilot, not a licence sitting unused, fully deployed across the business. When we show peers, distributors and vendors what that looks like, the reaction tells us we’re ahead; a lot of “AI strategy” in our industry still amounts to a single Copilot seat. The win isn’t any one tool, it’s that we can deliver AI capability at scale and in production, internally, in our customer-facing tools, and now in our service offering through building a dedicated AI Practice, we’re very excited for progress and innovation in our space.
Can you share a surprising prediction about how UK IT channel partners or the UK IT channel will evolve over the next 5 years?
Since ChatGPT landed in 2022, technology has been changing at a pace the channel simply hasn’t matched. Frontier AI is the clearest example: the broad channel still can’t transact LLMs through normal distribution the way it resells a Microsoft license – those remain bespoke, direct deals rather than something your average partner can quote and fulfil.
The framework of a VAR or MSP being able to transact and add value to the IT org has changed. For the first time, to progress adoption of a new technology, there is no transactional path in the channel. My prediction is that “value” in the channel gets redefined entirely over the next five years. The winners won’t be whoever moves the most boxes or licences, but whoever can integrate, secure and operationalise this technology faster than the customer could alone. Plenty of today’s partners won’t make that pivot.
Which tech gizmo (hardware or software) could you not function without?
Now, it’s the use of LLMs for productivity. It’s changed the way we work, and is a huge productivity gain. When used correctly, this gizmo can feel like it actually creates additional time in the day, a valuable commodity!
Which three famous people, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party?
I’ll go tech-heavy and very predictable on this one:
Elon Musk
Steve Jobs
Jensen Huang
I’d just let them talk and create the next tech era – and bet on the outcome!
If you had a warning label, what would it say?
Tough to answer – feels like self-critique!
I would say: Moves fast. Check twice before assuming this is finished.
Which tech figurehead has impressed you the most this year, and why?
Dario Amodei. Going up against the company you helped build and then surpassing it in enterprise adoption this quickly that also changed the perception of many of Agentic AI capability. Few people have the conviction and capability to do that.
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