Stop Guessing, Start Winning with AI (Rochdale)

Ben Rayner helps boards and leadership teams turn AI capability into measurable business performance.

Through Strategic Sherpas, he works as an external AI operating partner, helping businesses identify valuable opportunities, build the commercial case, redesign workflows and prove the return.

His approach is straightforward: business case before tools, people involved in the change and evidence before scale. Ben has completed MIT Sloan’s Executive Programme in AI and Business Strategy and designs and delivers executive education programmes, including AI in Sport and Business programmes for VSI and UNITAR.

Clients value his ability to make complex decisions understandable and build agreement across leadership teams.

Kshipra Bhat is a business transformation leader at BNY, with experience spanning transformation, innovation and organisational change. She is passionate about helping organisations navigate complex change in a way that delivers business impact while keeping people and culture at the heart of the journey. With AI and emerging technologies reshaping the way we work, Kshipra brings a people-first perspective to transformation — exploring how organisations can embrace innovation while empowering their people and staying true to their purpose. She brings a practical, collaborative approach, combining strategic thinking with curiosity and a strong focus on turning ideas into meaningful change.

​Harman Singh is a security professional with more than 10 years of consulting experience across private and public sector organisations. His day job involves serving his consulting business customers at Cyphere to reduce their security concerns. Cyphere’s primary expertise lies in technical risk assessments across traditional networks and cloud computing threat landscapes. Besides delivering pen testing, he has also delivered talks and trainings at Black Hat and regional conferences. His favourite security topics are Active Directory, Azure & Networks.

Sarah Ayton is a Consultant at Kensington Peaks Advisory, specialising in AI, digital transformation and business strategy. She works with organisations to understand where AI can create practical, measurable value and how it can be adopted effectively across the business.

With a background spanning AI and digital transformation, investment and strategic partnerships, Sarah has worked with hundreds of businesses, from SMEs and founders through to senior leadership teams, supporting technology adoption, innovation and organisational change.

Her approach is firmly business-first, focusing on the pressures organisations are facing, where capacity is being lost and where technology can genuinely improve the way people work.

Sarah is particularly passionate about making AI accessible to business leaders, cutting through the jargon and helping organisations move from simply experimenting with AI to using it with purpose, confidence and appropriate oversight.

Peter Ross has 30 years of experience as an architect, analyst, developer and technical project manager, with extensive experience delivering complex projects from end to end across multiple sectors. He is passionate about solving business problems through the appropriate use of technology and has experience delivering GenAI solutions into production for clients.

His expertise spans technical and solution architecture, business analysis and project delivery, including technical leadership, solution design, system integration, requirements analysis, business process modelling and improvement, software development and technical project management. He also has extensive experience with Microsoft technologies, including ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server and Azure, as well as Python. His AI experience includes OpenAI APIs, local LLMs, embedding models, RAG, classification, entity extraction and developing evaluations (evals).