Chris Carswell
Two decades in IT operations. One year shipping applied AI at portfolio-leading level. Currently building what software companies will wish they had built five years from now.
Now
I lead Technical Operations and AI engineering at a 25-year-old ITSM and HRCM software company, part of a multi-billion software group. In twelve months I have shipped a production AI platform, Solvyr®, that ranked first of forty-seven Group businesses on AI maturity. I co-presented at the Group's annual conference in Copenhagen this year, sharing a stage with Microsoft on the architecture beneath it. The work is in commercial deployment with paying customers and an active pipeline.
→The framework, the build, the proofBefore
Before this, I co-founded a national home services business and scaled it from a five-thousand-pound investment to fifteen million in turnover. We exited in 2023. The lesson I took from that decade is that strategy is what survives contact with operations, and that the gap between a good idea and a working business is paid for in nights, weekends, and decisions made with incomplete information. I have built twice. I prefer building.
→The full journeyHow I Work
I am a practitioner first. I write production code. I ship features. I prefer the answer that survives a real customer over the answer that survives a slide deck. The best architectural decisions I have made were made under operational pressure with people I trusted, not in workshops with people I was trying to impress.
I work at the intersection of strategy and the keyboard. That sounds like a contradiction and is increasingly not one. AI-assisted development has collapsed the distance between deciding and doing, and the operators who can hold both ends of that wire are, for the moment, rare. I am one of them.
I am suspicious of consultancy-grade language and allergic to performative urgency. I am candid in conversation, careful with people, and direct about what I think will and will not work. If you are looking for a yes-person, this is the wrong site.
“Chris consistently demonstrated an impressive appetite for developing and refining processes [...]. He is not only technically clever but also highly motivated [...]. I would happily work with him again and have no hesitation in recommending him.”
“Huge thanks to Christopher Carswell [...] for sharing his entrepreneurial wisdom. His passion for building with AI is infectious and perfectly aligns with why I love the Volaris Group Quadrants, it’s innovation with a roadmap. Feeling inspired and incredibly lucky to learn from the best.”
If This Resonates
If any of this sparked a thought, I'd genuinely welcome the conversation. The work gets sharper when I talk about it with other people wrestling with the same problems, and I enjoy meeting people who think carefully about service operations, applied AI, or what makes a business actually work. The contact form below is the easiest way to reach me, and I read everything that arrives.
Contact
Get in Touch
If you're interested in AI, cloud platforms or service operations and would like to connect, feel free to get in touch using the contact form or via LinkedIn.
Location
Stourbridge, UK