Phil WestcottFounder

United Kingdom - London, England,

Phil has a 20-year career in applied technology, and a decade building AI enterprise capability. Phil is CEO of Filament AI, a 36-person team of enterprise AI specialists with offices in London and Toronto, and overseen over 150 AI delivery projects in the last 4 years. He brings a rich and hugely practical experience of building strategic advantage for your business through the shrewd adoption of AI.

Phil is an Entrepreneur-in-residence at Nottingham University Business School, advising business owners on how to leverage AI technology to enhance their business model. He is a former executive at IBM, leading the IBM Watson platform in Europe, their Smarter Cities business in Southeast Asia and co-launching the IBM global IoT platform services practice.

Phil is a Chartered Engineer, and holds an MBA from IESE and Columbia business schools.

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From 2013, Phil was an early influencer in the new market of applied Artificial Intelligence. Phil led the Go-To-Market Strategy for Watson in public sector. He then led the Watson platform business in Europe, leading partnerships across Europe from large Systems Integrators to startups. He became an expert in the use cases of AI, business models and partnership models. In 2015, he was promoted to an executive role at IBM, leading global partnerships within IBM's Watson IoT leadership team.

In 2016, he decided to step out of his corporate career and launch Filament AI. Drawing from this experience running the Watson platform, he identified the lack of agile delivery capabilities in the market, with the large consultancy practices lacking agility and deep AI skills. Together with his business partner Doug, a school friend who had successfully built and sold a digital agency, they launched Filament. The purpose, to help enterprises achieve competitive advantage through the shrewd and agile adoption of AI technology.

After 4 years of operation, Filament has grown to 35 people with offices in London, Southampton and Toronto. The team of Applied AI experts including data scientists, software developers, consultants and designers, have delivered projects for HSBC, American Express, GE Healthcare, Boehringer Ingelheim, Unilever, Macquarie and T-Mobile.

Filament have developed two software products, driven by the challenges of deploying AI in enterprise:
- EBM - a chatbot integration and content management platform for enterprise IT infrastructure
- Syfter - a platform for building bespoke company insight solutions for Private Equity, M&A and ESG