Partner profile: Neil Taggart

Blue Hat Associates partner Neil shares his insights on the opportunities of AI in technology.

In this blog series, we introduce you to each of our Partners.

Blue Hat Associates is a collective of entrepreneurial technology leaders who’ve all lived through the challenges of scaling SaaS businesses. Working across Finance, Health, Media, Advertising and the Public Sector, we help clients achieve tech and product goals quicker and more cost-effectively. Combining strategic leadership, with a nearshore talent pool of over 1600 consultants, means we provide the flexibility, innovation and pace that scaleups need to grow.

Introducing Neil.

Neil is a technology leader who solves complex challenges, combining hands-on technical expertise with strategic leadership.

Neil has experience as a technical co-founder, board advisor and fractional CTO with expertise across wealth management, banking, consulting, healthcare and media.

Neil is at the forefront of AI adoption and training within Blue Hat Associates and client AI enablement.

How has the pace of technological change influenced the way you do your job?

The senior technologist role I enjoy is being able to steer the technology strategy. This sometimes means ‘what to say no to’ and can be as important as ‘what to say yes to’. 

Everyone in technology has an expertise, a new graduate will know the latest languages, and an experienced CTO will have a depth of experience. But the real skill is to orchestrate all these skills. I enjoy challenging pre-conceived ideas and guiding the younger practitioners but it’s reciprocal as this keeps me on my toes and up to date with technology change.

At no time has this been more noticeable than in the AI revolution we live through. You have to be a constant learner, be willing to change your mind and learn new ideas however much experience you bring to the table.

How do you help your clients build an organisation that can keep up with the pace of change? 

Staying lean and adaptive is the goal so that you can rapidly exploit the innovative tech and to not get bogged down by legacy. Some of my client work is with companies who have huge investments in legacy technology and are managing the associated technical debt. With the help of AI tooling – in experienced hands - we can now help plot a viable route out and a path to continuous delivery for your business.

Working with Anthropic has been a game changer. It’s made me more hands on than ever thanks to the tooling – I have become a forward-deployed resource, working in a small team to transform businesses and also running training sessions for clients. To date, I’ve trained over 5,000 people in Claude, and I’ve embedded within organisations to tackle the issue of legacy code.

Keeping up with the pace of change is a challenge but I’m in a good position to support any organisation with the desire to leverage AI as part of their SDLC or product.

How do you keep up with new technologies?

Keeping up with new technologies is about being curious. I combine reading and doing with collaborating with colleagues. Technology has been a hobby for me since I was a teenager, so the reading is baked in. The doing is either hands-on training courses or innovative projects. I think it’s important to play with the stuff, not just read and talk about it.

AI is now also helping, the tooling allows introspection, and the opportunity to learn by doing.

What’s next in AI ?

I think it’s local and specialised models. At the personal level, our phones and related accessories (glasses, headsets, watches, whatever) become our second brains.

At the organisational level, software becomes increasingly amorphous - a way of moving data and assets around in an optimal way. Supporting this organisational change with suitable guardrails and governance will deliver business evolution.

What technologies do you think stand the most chance to change your clients businesses in the next 3-5 years?

AI. Specifically, LLMs, but they are merely the gateway to wider AI enhancement.  They can write the code that enables system change that was previously too expensive to build, or more often too time consuming for the board focussed on annual returns.

I think most business and technology leaders know they are working with imperfect systems and can imagine their perfect organisation design and information architecture. In the past they lacked the expertise or funds to achieve it. With AI tooling, the productivity of and ambition of team members can make these once multi-year plans achievable in realistic timeframes.

What kinds of technology problems do you think will drive the next wave of innovation?

Data clarity is a continuing challenge. The world is producing way more data than it knows what to do with and it also has to consider the legal and ethical considerations in storing and processing this data.

That said, well thought through AI – machine learning and language models can transform that data to unlock the value and deliver optimised and actionable data. The multi-dimensionality of AI enables it to spot patterns in data that are unfathomable to humans. That is where the innovation lies.

How do you help your clients’ teams advance existing products and create new ones ?

Start by asking outsider questions: the ones that people forget after a while at the company. That can bring clarity and focus. Then a frank assessment of existing products and how well they meet their purpose. Out of that, the new products and product features emerge quite naturally. The answers are usually already within the company they’ve just become tied up in the day-to-day struggle.

At Blue Hat we have developed Hatstand to provide a rapidly deployable delivery framework, which can unleash innovation and improvements while still delivering operationally day to day. The framework allows a route into using AI at scale.

Why did you join Blue Hat Associates?

I was involved in a couple of really interesting startups after returning to the UK after 20 years overseas. Blue Hat offered me the chance to work  across a number of sectors, banking, fintech, media, government. Teaming up with Blue Hat was a very natural fit: I discovered a great team of wizards from a wide range of sectors and the freedom to explore all sorts of interesting projects

What next for AI and Blue Hat Associates?

I created Hatstand, our AI-first project and SDLC framework. It is inspired by a mixture of other tried and tested frameworks but refined to be tailorable to specific client organisations. I’m keen to get our clients using it to measurably accelerate their AI adoption.

Thanks for reading! We hope you’ve found it insightful to get to know Neil’s perspective on the tech landscape. You can connect with Neil on Linkedin.

Learn more about our other Partners and get in touch for a free, friendly chat anytime.