Concordia 2025

Concordia Winter 2024

That is where NetApp, the company I work for, comes in. Since its founding 32 years ago, it has striven to revolutionise the way companies store and manage their various forms of data. As market leaders in helping its customers build intelligent data infrastructures to harness the power of their data, it has become a key part of overcoming data impediments and getting AI out of theory and into practice. It is extremely exciting to be part of a company that is so integral to this AI revolution. * My interest in technology started early. Thanks to the rapid rise of affordable and accessible home computing in the UK in the 1980s — who can forget systems like the BBC Micro (part of the Computer Literacy Project) and the ZX Spectrum (from the pioneering Sir Clive Sinclair) — I taught myself to code in my early days at Northwood Prep. By the time I arrived at Merchant Taylors’, I was picking up programming jobs in my spare time for extra pocket money. The school played a pivotal role in nurturing this interest and I quickly found an affinity with what was then the Computer Club, tucked away behind and above the stage in the Great Hall. There was a frontier spirit to its endeavours. I recall both the then Head Master, Mr Gabitass, and my tutor, Mr Le Rougetel, realising that computing would be an ideal career for me, even when I thought it might be just a hobby. After university, I began my journey in IT at Electronic Data Systems (later Hewlett Packard). I spent a decade working and living in three continents, before moving to Cisco Systems, then NetApp, and now lead the Product Management organisation for its solutions business, with a focus on AI. Merchant Taylors’ School provided me with a foundation that, over the years, I came to appreciate was exceptional in its breadth and that instilled a sense of assured confidence, while ensuring my value system was both well developed and grounded.

intelligent product suggestions for on-line shopping, artist and track suggestions on music streaming services, and financial fraud detection and prevention for credit cards. The benefits of Predictive AI have been accruing slowly over the last decade to keep us safer, healthier, wealthier and happier. However, it was not until early 2022 and the emergence of ChatGPT by OpenAI that Generative AI started to come to the fore. Only now is it beginning to build economic and societal impacts of seismic proportions. Most industry commentators expect the impact of Generative AI to be in the same league as the introduction of the personal computer and the World Wide Web and far more visible than the rise of Predictive AI because GenAI is able to tackle repetitive processes to achieve huge efficiencies and drive entirely new revenue models. Examples include writing code based on the description of a desired outcome; customer-service chat bots that can resolve problems faster and with higher customer satisfaction; and real-time market analysis to enable optimal trading strategies. Expectations of GenAI have been heightened by a continuous stream of bullish macro-economic predictions, for example a report by McKinsey of June 2023 in which the impact of GenAI on revenue by industry was estimated to be anywhere from 50% to 460%, while labour productivity could stand to gain by as much as 0.6% per year to the end of the next decade (2040). But this revolution faces significant head winds that are slowing the adoption of AI and its associated macroeconomic impacts. All this computing power is nothing without the right data, delivered in the appropriate fashion to keep the system going; it is akin to an internal combustion engine and its need for fuel. Implementation of AI depends on the following: working out what data exist, and where, then unifying it into a ‘data lake’; organising and preparing the data so that it is usable; getting the data into the AI training ‘engines’ and training a model; moving and running the models in production, then learning from their performance to drive further fine-tuning cycles.

19