If AI is in its teenage years,
we are the parents.

First leadership roles, both of them. Online Editor at the Press Association, building Ananova — an AI personality layered over one of the country's most valuable knowledge graphs. Head of Content at Virtue TV, streaming The Doors and Paul McCartney to whoever's connection could take it. Neither idea was fully formed, and both left questions open that took twenty years to properly answer: what a machine owes the people it represents, and how far a story travels before the medium reshapes it.

Principal Consultant at PwC — a practical MBA taught in the field: R&D, business models, talent, risk, the tension between IT and the business, learned at high rates and higher expectations while criss-crossing the world fixing other people's operating problems. The dot-com's halcyon promises were over; only the top and bottom lines mattered now, and systems integration was the discipline of the decade as legacy infrastructure dragged itself online — Oracle already making the case that data itself was the asset. A first lesson in how invention survives contact with an institution.

Taught a systems integration course at Camosun College, Vancouver Island, in 2004 — a PwC posting — and caught the academic bug there, not in the firm. The PhD followed, but the peer group is what actually changed things: learning to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room, in a cohort that included the person I'd go on to build a family with, met in the first seminar, both January 2005 joiners. Under mentors who still shape how I think, growth mindset stopped being a phrase and became a practice: workforce transformation needs continuous learning more than upskilling, and behaviour change more than either. This is also where "Dr Chris" started — a credential built to bridge academic rigour and industry application, not just decorate a name.

Post-PhD, critical thinking applied to everything is its own strange isolation — theory sealed off from the world it explains. This era was the antidote: testing that thinking on the frontier, not just in corporate settings, with Richard Stallman, Pierre Lévy, Julian Assange, and Donna Haraway, watching cypherpunk theory, feminist technoscience, and singularity thinking actually manifest — in crypto, automation, peer-to-peer, open source. A wall in a Thames-side crypto mine read "if all else fails, use magic." Long stretches at IBM Watson's old South Bank HQ, and building Project Virtual Assistant, landed on the idea that defined everything after: responsible AI means being responsible with the technology, not just responsible to the people it touches. Also where the energy and sustainability interest properly took hold — impact widening from corporate performance to socioeconomic and planetary.

Chairman of Innovation at Edelman, and a five-year run of trusted relationships with some of the world's biggest and fastest-growing companies — structured foresight and empirical evidence standing in for opinion when it came to AI strategy. The deepest of them started on a whiteboard in Microsoft UK CEO Cindy Rose's office, sketching the S-curve behind Satya Nadella's freshly-arrived intent to rejuvenate the company's innovation potential. Microsoft's market cap went from $390bn in 2015 to $1.62tn in 2020; the research partnership that followed helped chart some of that arc. Two reports, "Maximising the AI Opportunity" (2018) and "Accelerating Competitive Advantage with AI" (2019), launched at Microsoft Decoded London — delivered the key findings on stage alongside Cindy Rose, and in 2018 watched people physically tear open the boxes scattered around the ExCeL Centre to get a copy. Quant and qual research on AI's earliest real use cases included a close look at OpenAI's GPT-1, months before Microsoft made its first investment in the company. One thread ran through all of it: augmentation — what AI tools actually do to capability, productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction, not what they promise to do.

Three more years of high-stakes Microsoft work, starting with "Creating a Blueprint for UK Competitiveness" — born out of the pandemic, launched on a Teams call with Satya Nadella himself, presenting blueprints for AI-driven recovery in the sectors hit hardest: aviation, hospitality, professional services. The wind stayed at our back working with Clare Barclay, Cindy Rose's successor as UK CEO — "Mission Critical" took the same rigour into cybersecurity, "Partnering on the Road to Net Zero" into sustainability, expanding into where AI actually crosses with both. Appointed one of 25 Global Strategy Officers at the World Economic Forum, the resident AI voice in an energy-transition working group of specialists — two working papers that went on to influence EU policy. Edelman's seat became permanent, plus a transitionary global advisory role on AI innovation, and the introductions that followed — DP World, Samsung, Chanel — turned into advisory relationships and stages of their own.

Then the founding itself: Symmetry, built with Jennifer Barth and Duncan Anderson as Chief Cognitive Officer — the same Duncan who ran those early IBM Watson experiments back in Chapter 04, by then former CTO of IBM Europe. A contract research service, a Strategic AI Roadmapping offer (STAIRS), and Sandbox as a Service for rapid prototyping — specialising early in agents, working with CrewAI before it was well known and later Microsoft Foundry, building a "factory" that wrapped data pipelines, security, and responsible-AI guardrails around whatever a client actually needed built. FSP saw it at their King's Cross all-hands in early 2025, made an offer that summer, and closed the acquisition that September — moving over to become Chief AI Officer at FSP, tasked with both revenue growth and AI market credibility, while Jennifer Barth became Chief Research Officer, building the research capability from the inside.