Fractional CIO and AI Transformation Director. 25+ years leading enterprise technology and transformation at the BBC, Arup, BSI, Heathrow, and WPP. Board trustee, AI governance practitioner, speaker, and researcher — working at the intersection of technology strategy, organisational change, and responsible AI.
David has over 25 years' experience leading enterprise technology and transformation programmes inside some of the UK's largest and most complex organisations — with a proud track record of world-first technology innovations.
At WPP, he built WPP Open, a £250m agentic AI platform spanning the group's technology stack. At Heathrow, Arup, BSI, and the BBC, he led technology and transformation programmes spanning infrastructure, platforms, products, and large-scale change delivery — the full lifecycle from business case to board reporting to live operation.
He is professionally qualified in both IT (CITP, BCS) and Finance (ACA, ICAEW) — a combination that shapes how he works: technology strategy that survives contact with a finance director, and investment cases that survive contact with reality.
Beyond the day job, David has served as a board trustee in the human rights and international development sectors for over a decade, sits on the AIGAS (AI Governance Standards) board, and is engaged with the London Business School Data Science & AI Initiative on the intersection of AI strategy and organisational change. His academic work has been broadly cited for over 20 years, most recently by the Tony Blair Institute and Pender Fund in their analysis of AI adoption.
He now works as a Fractional CIO and AI Transformation Director — bringing enterprise-grade technology and AI leadership to organisations that don't need, or can't yet justify, a full-time C-suite hire.
David speaks on AI governance and transformation, the AI J-Curve and organisational change, and the practicalities of board-level technology leadership — drawing on direct experience building and governing AI systems at enterprise scale. He's comfortable on a panel, in a fireside format, or delivering a standalone session, and works with event organisers on framing and audience fit ahead of time.
Alongside client engagements, David maintains an active research practice — testing frameworks, publishing findings, and working with academic and standards bodies on the questions that matter most for organisations navigating AI. Alchemy Labs is where that work happens.
David is engaged with the LBS Data Science & AI Institute on the intersection of AI strategy and organisational change — exploring how AI diffuses across organisations, and what that means for change leadership, governance, and operating model design. Their framing — that the real challenge of AI is less technological invention and more organisational diffusion — sits at the heart of much of Alchemy's current research.
David's 2026 SSRN preprint extends his original 2005 J-Curve of Change framework specifically to AI transformation — identifying three genuinely novel differentiators (the Simultaneously Within/Across Problem, Functional Boundary Dissolution, and the Inverted Training Problem) that require change management at a higher order of magnitude. Cited by the Tony Blair Institute and Pender Fund. Read the full AI J-Curve playbook or the academic preprint on SSRN.
David serves on the AIGAS board, working alongside practitioners and standards bodies on the practical translation of ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, and the NIST AI RMF into governance frameworks organisations can actually implement. This work directly informs the MASTER-AI ™ framework, Alchemy's six-domain model for AI governance.
An active research thread exploring AI hallucination not as a defect to be engineered away, but as the same generative property that makes AI commercially valuable — reframing what's often treated as AI's biggest bug as its greatest feature. This work draws on David's own working relationship with AI tools as a case study in human-AI collaboration.
Whether you're a journalist, event organiser, academic collaborator, or a business considering a Fractional CIO engagement — the fastest way to reach David is below.