Senior AI expertise. Direct access. Real outcomes.
Most AI consultancies send strategists who've never shipped a model, or developers who can't see the business picture. I provide both: PhD-level technical depth with 15+ years of commercial delivery.
Your consultant
Dr Colin Kelly
Oxford BA in Maths & Computer Science. Cambridge PhD in Natural Language Processing. 15+ years building AI systems across financial services, telco, and automotive. I founded Agathon to give organisations access to the kind of senior AI expertise that large consultancies promise but rarely deliver.
Read my storyHow I can help
Four ways to work together, each led personally by me from first conversation to final deliverable.
AI Product Pioneering
Hands-on development of AI products that exploit full technical potential — not basic implementations
Learn moreAI Due Diligence
Technical assessment that separates real AI capability from sophisticated marketing. Before you invest.
Learn moreAI Leadership Advisory
Strategic consulting to build internal AI capability that reduces outside dependencies
Learn moreFractional CTO
Ongoing executive technical leadership across all technology decisions, not just AI initiatives
Learn moreWhy Agathon
What you get when technical depth, commercial pragmatism, and personal accountability come together.
Technical depth that's rare in consulting.
I hold a PhD in Natural Language Processing from Cambridge. I've led applied AI research teams, built production ML systems, and delivered millions of pounds in quantified AI benefits across financial services, telco, and automotive. I understand how these models actually work, not just how to talk about them.
Commercial pragmatism that's rare in research.
Fifteen years in enterprise environments taught me that technical excellence means nothing if it doesn't ship. I've navigated funding rounds, managed complex stakeholder politics, and delivered under constraints that academic researchers never face.
Direct access, not delegation.
When you engage Agathon, you work with me. I don't sell then disappear. I don't hand you off to juniors. The person on the strategy call is the same person doing the work.
Case study
Fractional CTO Building Patent-Pending AI Product from Zero to Beta
How we took a ghostwriting firm from copy-pasting into ChatGPT to a patent-pending AI product in beta with enterprise users.
20 months
Engagement duration
5 hires
Team recruited
85%
AI rendering speedup
Case study
AI Strategy and Implementation Roadmap for a Major Global Foundation
How we helped a large communications division turn AI momentum into an implementation plan — in six weeks.
6 weeks
Engagement duration
11
Stakeholder interviews
2 delivered
Technical blueprints
Case study
AI Leadership Advisory: Transforming a Communications Firm's AI Capability
How we turned fragmented AI experimentation into shared frameworks, tested playbooks, and a concrete product roadmap over two months.
2 months
Engagement duration
3 half-day
Workshops delivered
Full team
Team members trained
Strategic workshops
Intensive, practical sessions designed to build real capability, not just awareness.
Latest insights
Inside sovereign AI governance: How it works when the frameworks meet reality
Sovereign AI governance fails not at the framework level but in the gap between documented controls and operational reality, where jurisdictional contradictions, supply chain dependencies, and untested incident response processes accumulate risk that compliance paperwork cannot see.
We've deployed Microsoft Copilot 365. Now what?
Deploying Microsoft Copilot is a logistics problem; extracting value from it is an organisational one, and most companies confuse finishing the first for starting the second.
Securing AI agents: Why tool use creates new attack surfaces
Securing AI agents requires treating the surrounding architecture as the threat surface, not the model itself, because authentication gaps, over-provisioned tool access, and prompt injection vulnerabilities combine to make your most capable agents your most dangerous ones.
What every startup founder should ask when hiring an AI advisor
Hiring an AI advisor is a technical architecture decision disguised as a people problem, and most founders make it by selecting for exactly the wrong qualities.
How AI Consulting Services Drive Digital Transformation
Most AI transformation programmes fail not because of technology, but because organisations treat it as a deployment problem rather than an organisational redesign challenge.
AI adoption strategy: why centralise, decentralise, and wait-and-see all fail
Centralising, decentralising, or waiting on AI all fail for the same reason: organisations treat adoption as a deployment problem rather than an organisational learning challenge.
What I've Learned Shipping AI Products That Most Consulting Advice Gets Wrong
Most AI product strategy advice fails in practice because the real challenges -- architectural rewrites, evaluation infrastructure, feedback loops, nonlinear timelines, and production edge cases -- only reveal themselves through hard-won experience of actually shipping AI systems.
Let's talk about what you're building
Whether you need hands-on AI development, strategic guidance, or technical due diligence, the first step is a conversation.
Get in Touch