Partner Spotlight: Zoë Webster - AI & Innovation

This month we put the spotlight on Zoë Webster, Associate Consultant for AI, Digital & Innovation

With over two decades in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sphere, Zoë Webster is renowned as a practitioner and leader, recently recognised as one of AI Magazine’s Top 10 Women in AI in the UK and Europe (2024). At Cambridge Management Consulting, Zoë takes on the pivotal role of leading our AI initiatives and driving digital innovation. Leveraging her extensive experience in developing and applying novel AI techniques across diverse sectors such as retail, cyber security, defence, and health, Zoë is instrumental in shaping our AI strategy and implementation. 

Her unique ability to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors, coupled with her insights on the opportunities and risks of emerging technologies like Large Language Models, positions her perfectly to guide our clients through the complexities of digital transformation. Zoë’s expertise ensures that we remain at the forefront of AI advancements, delivering cutting-edge solutions that drive sustainable growth and innovation for our clients. 

An Introduction to Zoë's work

Having been in the AI space for over 20 years, the past couple of years, since the launch of ChatGPT and the catapulting of AI into the public consciousness, have been in part eye-opening and in part déjà vu for me. The scale and reach are different to anything we have seen to date – I realised this when friends and family of all ages and backgrounds are talking about AI – but it is part of the well-cited technology hype pattern we have seen before in AI as specific techniques show promise (expert systems and neural networks, for example) and organisations see them as a way to solve current problems/challenges. 

I am fortunate in that I got into AI early. I describe myself as classically trained in that I learnt and experimented with the broad range of AI algorithms on different applications in my early career, so I understand that AI has much more to offer than whatever technique is currently in vogue.   

After developing and demonstrating novel AI techniques in a range of applications, I got the opportunity to learn more about the role of innovation to the wider economy and society through my time at Innovate UK, now part of UK Research and Innovation. From that, I understand the impact of technology and how business innovation can be accelerated given the right conditions and collaborations. My COVID-19 story includes the juggle of leading Innovate UK’s first COVID-19 innovation competition, to get critical grant funding out to businesses to ensure innovation could continue during this time, while attempting to home-school two children. 

During lockdown I joined BT, where I built and led their AI Centre of Enablement to scale up AI development and deployment across the company. Developing a machine learning model as a proof-of-concept is one thing, but it takes a whole other set of skills and approaches to successfully and safely deploy that model at scale and with real users, and then to repeat that for other models for different applications. Luckily, my breadth of experience as well as my deep AI expertise enabled me to set up and lead the team to specify and address dozens of AI opportunities.

Even as the current developments in AI fail to quite live up to all the hype for everyone, organisations have an opportunity to apply the best and most relevant advancements to generate value, whether that is through customer acquisition, better customer service, better colleague experience, greater productivity or improved sustainability. This goes beyond the technology but to AI governance too, which means thinking carefully about how to practice AI responsibly. Working with Cambridge Management Consulting, I am excited to use my breadth and depth to help more organisations make the most of AI to create value in meaningful ways.

To find out more about our AI, digital and innovation services, go to our Innovation service page or contact Zoë using the form below.