Richard Neish on the changes and challenges 101 Ways' clients face

The world is an increasingly volatile place, with major changes in government and geopolitical tensions around the globe. Richard Neish, CEO of tech consultancy 101 Ways, explains how the firm is helping firms adapt to the macroeconomic challenges that they face.

Can you provide some insight into 101 Ways – the services you offer and the size and profile of your typical client? What makes 101 Ways different to other tech consultancies?

101 Ways is a technology consultancy serving the custom software and data transformation needs of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in financial services, healthcare and retail.

We are a business of engineers and data scientists who write code, simplify data and build technology, taking our client’s strategic plans (the million £ PDFs the big consultancies leave behind) and turning them into reality.

Our approach focuses on three areas; engineering quality, speed to value, and upskilling client teams. We call this ‘transformation through delivery’.

Enterprise clients expect exceptional quality, so we code to elite DORA standards. We recognise that speed is a business advantage, so we put teams on the ground quickly and accelerate value drivers. Then, importantly, our clients need ownership of their transformation, so we upskill their teams, permanently improving quality and velocity.

Our clients tell us that working with 101 Ways is like working with a personal trainer. ‘You know you’ll get technical excellence and drive quality, but you’re also making us better at the same time.’

AI was all anybody could talk about this time last year - as we head into 2025, how do you see the technology impacting the industry now that we’ve moved past its initial hype?

Scale will be the marker of AI’s effectiveness, and data foundations will be its biggest stumbling block.

For all the fervour, the majority of AI explorations paused with a tick box proof-of-concept. Investor relations choirs sang ‘We did an AI thing!’ and momentum softened without triggering widespread change.

While we’ve started looking at the opportunity through the right lens, we need to widen the aperture and scale from discrete low-risk use-cases, to testing bigger, higher-value, more complex problems. This recalibration will allow us to address the central promise of the thesis; that AI can transform business outcomes at scale.

Increasing the scale increases the risk. Back in the heady days of the generative AI prompt economy (earlier this year - time flies), technology was constrained by human dependency. Outcomes were only as good as the experience of the human who asked the question.

2025 will witness the rise of agentic AI, which goes a step closer to taking the fallible human out of the loop. Agentic AI plans and takes action autonomously. Think insurance claims assessment and processing without human friction. This is driving the development of ‘guardian agents’; AI agents tasked with policing and governing multi-agent systems.

Suffice to say that the AI landscape is set to continue evolving at lighting speed, tempered by one key factor. There is a growing acknowledgement that enterprise businesses have underinvested in the single biggest enabler of AI ambitions; well-structured and well governed data foundations.

What other trends do you think will define business challenges in 2025?

Out of earshot of the City analysts, business leaders are talking in hushed tones about ‘green shoots’ in 2025. It’s a sentiment nobody is willing to bet the house on, but which recognises a number of early indicators of greater economic stability over the hill. The macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions that have become adept at spoiling the party in recent years haven’t gone away, but have edged back slightly, watching from shadows.

Modern technology’s role in reducing operational overhead and increasing revenue will therefore remain front and centre in 2025. Platforms and systems that increase efficiency, cloud modernisation that pays down technical debt, and connected ecosystems that improve customer experience and consumer loyalty are evergreen budget lines for our times.

I have a hopeful suspicion that 2025 could herald the return of innovation. When multiples dropped and M&A slowed, the market lost a key driving factor. Less new blood, less disruptive thinking, less investment in innovation, less differentiating competition. More recently we’re seeing a sense of first mover advantage. Those businesses that have quietly continued to invest in their transformation roadmaps during the slowdown are now coming to market with sector leading innovation, forcing the hands and budgets of their competitors. Fast-followers moving to protect market share should reignite the innovation friction that drives momentum.

If market conditions boost much-needed demand, then the constraint will flip quickly to supply, putting emphasis back on employee value proposition and the need to attract and retain great staff. The yo-yo boom and bust of talent since the pandemic has increased transience and stretched employee loyalty thin. The businesses that can adapt fastest, articulate what they stand for, and find the optimum biting point between working remotely and meaningfully coming together, will win.

How does your new role as CEO differ to your previous position as CSO? Where do you think the greatest challenges will lie in taking this step in your career?

An early career in advertising opened my eyes to strategy; how commercial and behavioural insights could be simplified into creative messages and actions that engage, inspire, and create change. That relationship between reductionism and clarity stayed with me as I grew to lead commercial functions and then businesses.

As my career grew, I needed balance. Switching off is such an important catalyst to high performance, and beyond business I’ve spent the best years of my life running short distances into people in the name of rugby. I challenge anyone to think of work with a 20 stone South African running at you.

Today I play fly-half for Cobham RFC All Stars, a Veterans XV for men who should have stopped playing years ago but can’t quite let go of the sport they love. A team’s fly-half shoulders a lot of responsibility, dictates the tempo, makes the big calls, and has to communicate with clarity in the moments that matter. Think of the fly-half as CEO. Alongside the fly-half is the inside-centre who has more space and time to analyse the opposition, the field position, and feed critical insights to the fly-half. The CSO if you will.

Both business roles share DNA. Strategic, commercial, analytical; questioning, learning, teaching; and ultimately understanding that if you want to bring people with you on the journey, you have to paint a clear and compelling vision of the future, and be able to explain ‘why’.

The backdrop to my tenure as CSO was taking a publicly listed company private in a period of social disruption on a global scale. As CEO of 101 Ways my job is to scale a private-equity backed technology consultancy in a complex market. Both nuanced, both highly compelling.

You’re stepping into 101 Ways at a pivotal moment of growth. Can you share some of the key strategic priorities you’ve identified for the consultancy’s future?

When a market contracts a business has to increase deliberacy. A growth market can support a broad proposition, but the current economic climate has driven an increase in demand for specialism. Clients are demanding considerable subject matter expertise and evidence that you’ve executed those services within their industry sector.

For 101 Ways this has meant changing the way that we go-to-market by focusing on key strategic sectors and increasing the connections between sales, marketing, technology leadership, and technology partnerships so that the overlaps become multipliers.

Price sensitivity will remain a theme in 2025, so where you source talent becomes a key consideration. At a moment when nearshore delivery has become tablestakes, 101 Ways will continue to differentiate with exceptional engineering quality, speed to value and upskilling our clients as we scale both onshore and nearshore for the benefit of our clients.

We’ve also put the office experience under the microscope. While we will never return to five days a week in the office, we know that the work is better when teams spend meaningful time together.

We have to design an environment specifically for collaborative working. Spaces that allow cross-functional teams to workshop ideas, environments that stimulate learning and idea exchange, and working spaces that bring the best out of a multitude of working styles. The value exchange is strikingly simple; working together has to be a better experience than working in isolation for the moments that matter. If your office resembles a battery farm with row after row of desks and oversubscribed meetings rooms your staff will vote with their feet.

In your experience, what are the most important considerations to bear in mind when it comes to growing 101 Ways’ international presence?

We think about international presence in two ways; accessing target clients and accessing exceptional talent.

No business has a right to success in new geographies, and the industry is littered with brands that made the mistake of thinking that success in their domestic market would automatically translate into momentum in a new country.

Markets differ country by country, state by state, city by city. Buying cultures are different, economic pressures vary, the competitor landscape is nuanced, and the need to stand for something niche increases.

Building organically from the ground-up can work if you can go in on the back of existing clients with international or global relationships. This requires trusted leaders and a runway of funding that isn’t under pressure to deliver returns quickly.

An inorganic strategy that acquires a good business with local leadership, existing clients, and that can benefit from synergies with the mothership, gives a more stable platform for growth.

On the talent front we constantly scan markets for high quality software and data engineering communities. Not just the individuals, but the infrastructure that can support long-term supply. Government investments in the tech economy, the university system, affordable housing, working and social culture. We don’t compromise on quality, that comes first, then we have to have the confidence to be open minded and learn from different cultures, not insisting that our way is the only way.

In your previous role, you helped Kin + Carta become a certified B Corp and led major restructuring efforts. Do you envision bringing a similar focus on social impact and sustainable business practices to 101 Ways, and if so, how?"

Becoming the first publicly traded B Corp on the London Stock Exchange was an incredible milestone in the Kin + Carta journey, and standing on the balcony as we opened the London Stock Exchange will forever be a personal career highlight.

One of my central perspectives coming into 101 Ways was that what worked for one business, may not be the best path for another. You have to do what’s right for the environment that you lead, not that you led.

To borrow B Corp’s central challenge, I believe completely that 101 Ways should be a business that uses technology as a force for good. Taking that from intent to impact manifests in many more ways that certification. Impact at scale means embedding social and environmental responsibility into the core product that you take to market, not side initiatives or isolated endeavour, but right at the heart of what you sell.

For example, your AI strategy is probably at odds with your carbon reduction commitments. As AI scales, it’s putting greater demand on highly energy intensive processing power. IBM published recently the staggering statistic that 90% of the words data was created in the last two years, and the data centres that process and store these loads are energy intensive, consume vast amounts of water for cooling (Google’s data centres alone use 450,000 gallons of water per day), and account for 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

This makes the decisions you take around your technology ecosystem critical. Are you using clean energy? Are you prioritising green data centres? Are you building efficient technology, or are you fundamentally adding to the problem? Are you writing algorithms without bias? Are you nurturing a culture of diversity and inclusivity?

Any technology leader who thinks that they don’t have a role to play in social and environmental responsibility is lying to themselves.