Biography

I have spent thirty years inside businesses while technology remade them: as a software engineer, an operator, a founder, and for the past eleven years at the centre of the world’s largest cloud business. Today I lead the remaking of businesses around AI and emerging technology: executing it inside the business, and advising the Boards accountable for it. This is the full story, in order.

The formative years (1996 to 2002)

I started at the Leicester Mercury in 1996, on an industrial placement during my Software Engineering degree, where I helped launch the UK’s first regional-newspaper website. Two years later, Regional Independent Media hired me as Chief Digital Officer: a £177m-turnover, £43m-profit media group of more than a hundred regional newspaper titles, the oldest dating back to 1752, backed by Candover, Goldman Sachs, and NIB. I created the group’s digital strategy and built its digital business from a standing start to a £5m-turnover profit centre, hiring 110 people across engineering, content, and commercial roles along the way. RIM was sold to Johnston Press for £560m in 2002.

The founder years (2002 to 2015)

In 2002 I founded Chapter Eight, a SaaS business and card payments platform built for the nascent ecommerce market. We processed more than £125m of ecommerce transactions a year for clients including The Coca-Cola Company, Gulf Oil International, Charities Trust, and Aston Villa Football Club, and we were the first company in the world to hold PCI DSS Level 1 certification and Visa Merchant Agent List accreditation at the same time. I wrote the business plan, raised three rounds of investment, and ran the company for thirteen years, delivering more than 100 transformation projects that generated over £2 billion in revenue for our clients. When cloud arrived I re-engineered our platform onto it, and between 2010 and 2015 planned and led the migration of over 400 clients onto AWS.

Alongside the company I held non-executive and advisory roles, including Non-Executive Director of Leeds Media and of Credit Style (Co-Founder), and a seat on the BBC’s New Media Advisory Panel during its digital transformation.

The frontier years (2015 to today)

I joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015, having arrived the way many Amazonians do: as a customer first. In the eleven years since I have built and led teams across Professional Services, Business Development, and Field Sales, including launching the Migration and Modernisation practice and the Experience-Based Acceleration business across EMEA, leading Business Advisory in Professional Services globally, and scaling the Executive Centre of Excellence that helps AWS field teams engage Boards and executive leadership. Through that work I have advised the executive teams of some of the world’s largest organisations and built the business case and adoption frameworks used to guide their transformations.

I am currently Head of Applied AI & Emerging Technology Strategy, shaping how a global field force takes AI to its customers. The industry has now moved to forward deployment, embedding engineers directly inside enterprises to build AI where the work happens. That makes the layer above the engineering matter more, not less: someone still has to decide what gets remade, in what order, and who answers for the result. That is where I work.

This has also been the period when the work went public. I have written about technology and the businesses it remakes since 2000, but it was during the pandemic, writing a couple of more substantive pieces as a Press Spokesperson for AWS, that an occasional habit became a commitment. Since then the writing has become a body of work in its own right: articles on AI, governance, and the boardroom; Board Briefings that gather everything on one topic in one place; and whitepapers that take the biggest ideas to full depth. The Board in the Machine, my monthly newsletter and podcast, carries the recent work to directors and senior executives with the hype stripped out. I speak internationally on AI strategy, governance, and The Great Remaking, on conference main stages, in broadcast studios, and privately with Boards, which is where the real thinking tends to happen. And I advise Boards and executive teams directly on the decisions the rest of this page describes: what to remake, in what order, and how to govern it while the goalposts move.

Board experience

I am a Chartered Director (since 2006) and was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Directors in 2015. Chartered Director is the IoD’s gold standard in director education, the discipline of directing a business rather than running it. My executive and non-executive experience spans media, retail, financial services, FMCG, oil & gas, manufacturing, logistics, airline, and consumer services, and my views on AI governance are cited in the IoD’s business paper AI Governance in the Boardroom (2025).

My own work

Everything I publish sits under a single idea, The Great Remaking: AI is not changing the tools around work, it is remaking the work itself. Remake is my response, built across all three parts of my career: a vendor and product agnostic framework for the Board that governs a remaking and the people who execute it. Remake includes the Remake Library, the named intellectual property that is the engine of Remake.

Education and where I live

I hold a BSc (Hons) in Software Engineering and am a Data Science & AI alumnus of the London School of Economics. I live in the UK and Cyprus, hold dual UK and EU citizenship, and work globally.