Stop Guessing, Start Winning with AI (Rochdale)

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.

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.

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).

Anthony Harrison is the founder and Director of APH10, bringing over 40 years of engineering experience to the challenges of modern software supply chain risk management. Throughout a career spanning software, systems, and cyber engineering, Anthony has consistently focused on one goal: delivering mission-critical solutions where security and resilience are non-negotiable.

As an active open-source contributor, and speaker at conferences around Europe, he is a strong advocate of the benefits of transparency in software as a way of evidencing the security and resilience of software solutions. He is a contributor to a number of international standards around the software supply chain which now includes AI which he considers is just software (although rather complex!).

He is keen to share his knowledge with the next generation by mentoring students and has acted as a mentor for the Google Summer of Code for the past 4 years and has been teaching coding skills to students at Manchester CoderDojo for over 10 years.