Your board is accountable for technology risk. When I'm in the seat, that's handled.

Technology risk sits with the board now, and it is moving fast. In Australia, APRA's CPS 230 names technology, data and change management risk explicitly — controls, tolerances and the supplier policy all land with the board. In the UK, 84% of firms now name one individual accountable for their AI.

That is a lot to carry, and most boards are still finding their feet on it. Directors are honest about that: in PwC's survey of around 700 of them, only 15% felt their board had the skills to oversee an AI strategy. It is a new discipline, not a failing — and it is fixable.

You will not be asked to become technologists. You get reporting you can interrogate, tolerances you can approve, a supplier position you can defend, and a clear grasp of the risk you are signing off. That is the part of the job I take off your desk — which is why the engagement runs calm rather than dramatic.

The track record behind it: £5M technology budget owned and cut 70% in 40 days, 55 aging systems consolidated to 15, a £1B enterprise programme delivered, £55M of acquisition readiness in six weeks. TOGAF-certified enterprise architecture.

Every board is being asked about AI right now, and most are being sold a subscription to somebody else's cloud. That puts the firm's data, its clients' data and its regulatory obligations on servers it does not control, under terms that can change without notice.

It is also one less thing to manage. Regulators have started treating concentration on a handful of providers as a risk in its own right — APRA and ASIC name reliance on a small number of providers as a systemic vulnerability. An AI that runs on hardware you own removes that dependency rather than managing it: nothing on your supplier register you cannot point to.

I build that kind. Private AI on hardware the company owns, on its own data, with a model choice that is not locked to one supplier. It is the same architecture I run my own company on.

For regulated businesses — funds, advisers, anyone holding client money or client data — that settles the questions that come up first: where the data lives, and who else has a claim on it. Nothing leaves the building, and there is no provider to reassure the board about. I can hold both halves of that conversation: the strategy and governance a board expects, and the engineering most interim CTOs cannot do themselves.

Most consultants want a clean greenfield build. I want the opposite. When a company calls me in, it is usually because a technology programme has gone over budget, stalled mid-migration, or is being held together by one exhausted person who is close to walking out.

That is where I am best. My peers call me the Cleaner — I take on the hard, old, failing programmes nobody else wants, and I finish them.

First I stabilise the people. Boards, stakeholders and delivery teams get straight answers and a realistic plan before anyone builds anything else. Then I set one agreed architecture and one agreed direction, and the programme starts moving again.

My stable rule: shipped software is the basis of confidence. When a programme starts delivering again, the attrition stops and it closes.