Max Pardo-Roques launches Lean AI consultancy Boxtree
As UK businesses pour money into AI licences without seeing returns, former Develop Consulting commercial director Max Pardo-Roques has launched a new firm applying Lean methodology to the problem. Birmingham-based Boxtree Consulting argues much of the industry has “AI implementation backwards”, and aims to help clients remedy that.
The gap between AI spending and AI returns is becoming one of the defining features of the UK economy. Fewer than three in ten UK businesses with under 50 staff were using AI in 2025, against 44% of firms employing more than 250, according to ONS data analysed by the Bennett School of Public Policy. A June report from the government’s AI Champion for Advanced Manufacturing, meanwhile, warned that too many manufacturers are caught in a “pilot trap” of AI experiments that never reach production – while former prime minister Rishi Sunak used a Sunday Times column to caution that slower adoption could leave smaller firms at a “compounding disadvantage”.
Boxtree Consulting was created with the hope of closing precisely that gap. Based in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, the firm applies Lean – the improvement methodology derived from the Toyota Production System – to find the manual processes AI can now automate, from invoice checking and data entry to scheduling and compliance, and to build solutions inside the systems clients already run.
The firm is the creation of Max Pardo-Roques, who has spent more than 15 years in operational excellence and transformation consultancy, most recently as commercial director of the specialist Lean improvement firm Develop Consulting, working with clients across manufacturing, FMCG, airports, logistics and professional services.
“Chief executives, finance directors and operations directors all tell me they’re implementing AI,” said Pardo-Roques, who serves as Boxtree’s chief executive. “Look closer and they’ve bought ten or fifteen Copilot licences, a few people are writing better emails and the marketing copy has sharpened up. That’s individual productivity, not transformation. Nobody has touched the processes where the money actually sits.”
In a typical mid-sized business, he argues, those processes absorb hundreds of thousands of pounds of staff time a year – much of which can now be done by AI agents within the systems the business already runs.
Moving beyond the pilot trap
The firm works with organisations across manufacturing, logistics, professional services and other operations-heavy sectors.
Boxtree’s model is “deliberately unglamorous”, according to Pardo-Roques. A Lean diagnostic maps a client’s processes and puts a pound value on the waste within them; a business case is built for each opportunity, with projects proceeding only where first-year returns provably exceed the cost of the work; and solutions are embedded inside the systems the business already uses, rather than bolted on through a new ERP or finance platform.
On that basis, the firm guarantees every engagement is cost-neutral within its first year, and targets a five-to-one return on investment.
“Most of the industry has this backwards. It starts with the technology and goes hunting for a use case,” Pardo-Roques added. “We start with the process and the value attached to it, and we only automate where the numbers stack up. That’s why we can guarantee cost-neutrality in year one: if a project won’t pay for itself, we won’t recommend it.”
Echoes of the Lean wave
Boxtree joins a lengthening list of specialist AI advisories to enter the UK market over the past year – Klarus, Lightouch Consulting and Valliance among them – as clients look for help converting AI investment into measurable results. Where many of the new entrants position themselves as AI-native alternatives to the traditional consulting model, Boxtree’s bet is that the discipline which transformed manufacturing operations a generation ago is the right lens for AI implementation today.
Pardo-Roques sees a direct parallel with that earlier wave of operational change, “Twenty-five years ago, businesses responded to Lean by sending junior staff on training courses, and little changed until specialist implementation firms got involved. AI is at exactly that point. The licences are the training course. Implementation is where the value is.”
