Chris Duffy
Top 20 AI Leaders Winner 2026 | Fractional CAIO | Forbes Expert | UKSF Veteran
I spent 23 years in UK Defence, 6 of them with 22 SAS as a Yeoman of Signals. The job never changed: get the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make a better decision. AI does that job. That's why I'm here.
My background is operations and change, which is why the technology is the part I worry about least. Most AI rollouts stall on people and process. Nobody wrote down what good looks like before they bought anything, and nobody got leadership using the tools they were telling everyone else to use.
So we start with the ground rather than the tools. Training and enablement first, because adoption is the whole game. Then the governance layer: the AI Manifesto and the guardrails that go with it, built to ISO 42001, UK GDPR and NIST AI RMF. Governance is a gate. It removes the barriers to adoption.
Security runs through all of it. I led technical delivery on the £30M ASGARD AI programme for the British Army, I'm Security Cleared, and I've worked alongside enterprise CISOs on AI risk in the enterprise.
IgniteAI works across the UK and UAE. We're part of the Claude Partner Network, with specialist architects for training, AI operating system builds and the adoption work that makes it stick.
Skills that stay when we go.
Christian Pogan
AI Developer and Engineer
Christian works with UK, EU and US founders to turn ideas and problems into working systems: managed agentic systems, AI agents, automations, and the internal web apps around them. He has founded a hardware startup, shipped for the European Commission, and now builds for SMEs who need AI that works on Monday morning rather than only in a demo or proof of concept.
Dan Charles
AI Solutions and Product
Eight years across financial services, energy and telecoms, in pre-sales, post-sales and product development from idea to deployment: regulated, high-stakes work where systems have to be both fast and auditable. Dan helps SMEs solve real problems in their organisations and get value from AI in how they work day to day.
Jeremiah Johnson
AI Consultant and Forward-Deployed Engineer
Jeremiah helps organisations turn AI from a collection of tools into measurable business capability. He has delivered AI strategy, training and implementation programmes for Deloitte, Disney, the World Bank, Adobe, JCDecaux and GE Healthcare, across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Based in London, he publishes practical AI demonstrations daily, drawn from using AI every day for more than 500 consecutive days.