Introducing our new Group CTO

Who are you?

I am Richard Conway – Acora’s new Group CTO and I will be bringing all things technology and innovation to Acora.

What is your background in technology?

In 2008, Microsoft had what they call an SDR, which is like a big marketing release or something. It was all it was all encoded in some language that nobody really understood. Amazon Web Services was two years old at that stage. So everybody knew that Microsoft was going to release its cloud, but nobody knew what form it would take. So from that SDR, I just realised that this is going to be incredibly significant for me and just for anybody that uses technology. So I threw myself into that. And then within a couple of years, Elastacloud was born.

Who are Elastacloud and what has been your involvement with AI?

In the UK, there were only two people that were employed in Microsoft. Now everybody is employed and you can really see this whole shift and transition. So when anybody talks about digital transformation over the last 15 years, it’s a cloud of digital transformation initially to to cut costs later on to to build out like large scale engineering simulations or financial simulations in the cloud, and then later on people realise what you could do with data at scale. And that’s where everything took off.

AI and machine learning were interchangeable. And anybody that said anybody that used the term I was a bit of a populist, any technical person that you mentioned it to in a meeting wouldn’t give you the business. You know, they’ll insist on machine learning and the idea of machine learning was that you could take a lot of data and you had the cloud scale to train a model and you could effectively predict the future, or you could or you could predict something that a human would have to do.

What does the AI-Driven Revolution mean to you?

I would say the the age driven revolution on the surface is about a lot of vendors investing a lot of money in training eyes to know absolutely everything based on what what the content of the Internet is. And that takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of compute and it makes it much easier for us when we consume it to just be able to ask that something like using a natural language query rather than use Google or Bing or another search engine.

I think the idea of an AI-Driven Revolution for customers is quite different. It’s about trying to understand how AI is going to affect digital transformation within the organisation. Digital transformation for most organisations hasn’t been an easy road. There’s been lots of failures, even in the data platform space, which we’ve been mainly working in.

What is your mission at Acora?

Acora fundamentally has great people, but I now have the opportunity to disrupt all of this, bring a lot of new key technology and agile processes and especially next generation AI so that we can do something different.