David Perkins

David is based in Northamptonshire and helps small and medium businesses in the UK sort out the bits of their work a computer should really be doing.

He was an internal auditor for over a decade before this. Professional services, government, tech. The job was to walk in, work out how a business actually runs rather than how it says it runs, and then say so out loud, including to people who would rather hear something else. That is still what he does. He has just pointed it at AI and automation instead.

So most jobs start with him having a proper look at where the time goes. Then he builds the thing that fixes it, on the client’s own systems, so they own it and are not renting it off anyone forever. He does a fair bit of AI training with teams too, and he looks after things once they are running.

The bit that seems to surprise people is that he will tell them not to build something. There is a lot of noise about AI at the minute and, honestly, most of what he does is not AI at all. He has no software to sell, so he has no reason to talk anyone into anything.

He got here because he automates things for fun. He and his family hired a campervan and drove the north coast of Scotland, and he spent the weeks before it building something that would find them decent stuff to do within fifty miles of wherever they had parked up. Nobody asked for it, nobody paid him for it, and he lost a good few weekends to it quite happily.

That is still his favourite part. Getting lost in something until it finally works, and the moment in a meeting where someone stops being polite and starts saying “hang on, could you do this bit as well?”