Four worlds,
one consistent question.

My story with technology starts earlier than consulting. During university I spent a placement year at IBM, a full year in industry in the marketing department. It was an amazing experience, and almost by chance it became the moment everything clicked: I ended up hosting one of the hospitality suites at the Wimbledon Championships. From there I saw, first hand, how IBM's technology was quietly powering the whole event. The commentators were leaning on an IBM feed to sharpen what they said. The systems were helping the umpires know whether a ball was in or out, long before that was normal. None of the people enjoying the tennis knew any of it was there. That is what hooked me: technology sitting behind an experience, shaping it, without anyone needing to notice. Watching senior clients realise what it could do for them was just as fascinating as the technology itself.

Around the same time I was President of the University of Surrey Students' Union. It was huge fun, and at a very young age it put me on the university's board of directors, helping represent around 20,000 students. The responsibility was real, and so was the education. That year was where I first felt what it is like to sit at the decision-making level of a complex organisation, and where a lot of my thinking about leadership started to take shape, including the privilege of advising and coaching a lot of brilliant people who carried me through it.

Meeting an EY partner opened the door to the graduate programme, and it turned out to be an incredible foundation. I worked across a whole range of sectors, but almost always on complex, transformational programmes. The reputation I cared about building was a simple one: people first, technology as an enabler rather than something you bolt on for its own sake, and high-performing teams that could actually deliver.

Around 2015 and 2016 I started to see the industry changing, and we began to look at consulting differently. We landed on a concept we called asset-based consulting, and I co-founded the part of EY that became EY Growth Solutions: taking the intelligence we already had inside the firm and turning it into digitally enabled products that could serve a far wider client base. That experience forced me to think differently about how you actually innovate. It also led me to the Ministry of Finance, where I helped design and launch the MBRF accelerator, became its managing director, and steered it through launch and its first two and a half years.

Then came the chance to create something new: a venture builder, RAI Digital, that brings consulting, design and engineering together to work hand in hand with organisations that have real ambition, and to build ventures with them rather than just advise on them. That is how we built our first venture, Infinite PL, a logistics technology business, and how we are now building others across the Middle East.

My focus now is to keep building ventures with ambitious clients, but more than ever to use AI, and agentic AI in particular, to fast-track those ventures and the outcomes they are chasing.

Recently, my old Uni (University of Surrey) asked me to come back to Surrey Business School in Guildford to guest lecture on the future of consulting. The honest version of that talk is a lot of what I write about now.