I've worked in large companies for nearly 20 years, in management consulting, financial services and utilities, learning how a business really runs: the operations, the IT, the data and processes underneath, and how the corporate, legal and compliance functions work. I've delivered, overseen and been involved in lots of projects to improve things in the business or to fix things that have gone wrong.
For the last two years I have taught myself AI, hundreds of hours of video tutorials and everything I could read, until I understood the technical side and how to use it on real work. I am a big champion of what it can do, particularly for small businesses.
In March 2026 I moved back from London to the North East and set up my own AI consultancy and technology company, helping businesses work out where AI can add value for them and how to get there.
To run that business I built a team of assistants in Claude: marketing, finance, product, customer success, legal, compliance. All the functions of an ordinary company, in digital form. Everybody who saw it asked me the same question. How can I get that in mine?
I love seeing the penny-drop with people when they realise what is possible with AI and then get the bug to learn and do more themselves.
I set myself a challenge: build my mum an email assistant. Something that reads her inbox, tells her if anything looks dodgy and marks the ones it has checked so she knows.
I did not sit and code it. I ran it the way a business runs a build. I wrote the roles first: a product manager, an IT manager. They interviewed me on what it needed to do. We got to a specification, handed that over, built it, tested it, and I made a separate one whose only job was to check the first one's work, the way an internal audit function would.
Instead of chocolates, she got a working AI Agent prototype. This was my proof of what Claude was capable of and that my structured approach worked. The skill was being clear about the process and giving AI specific roles. This is what I've spent my career doing.
Watch the video of it here.
The more businesses I speak to, the more I hear the same stories:
- They're using AI, but only for simple tasks
- They know they can do more, but don't know where to start
- There are so many options available, they're not sure what to do
So I'm on a mission to make AI more accessible and understood by small businesses right across the UK. Build My AI Team does exactly that: a structured guide for people to work through and build their own AI team, customised for their business and their needs, and to develop the skills, knowledge and capability to operate it.
I run this from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, my hometown and I'm really looking forward to hearing how people get on with their own AI team and how it starts helping your business.