Odokai Ltd is a small group of people who have built and run software businesses before, working across AI, engineering, and consulting. We build the governed platform your teams run on, and we work alongside you when the job is discovery, implementation, or both.
We operate out of England. The people below shape the company and do the work.
The leadership and delivery leads you work with on engagements and product direction.
AI Engineering Leader
Lewis is a London-based software engineer with more than twenty years of hands-on delivery and leadership experience. In the last ten years Lewis has helped organisations including M&S, Gousto, Barclays, and Fidelity Investments shape and run strong agile software engineering teams. For the last three years Lewis has been an AI engineering advocate working to integrate AI and use it as core part of engineering practice.
Lewis is a London-based software engineer with more than twenty years of hands-on delivery and leadership experience. In the last ten years Lewis has helped organisations including M&S, Gousto, Barclays, and Fidelity Investments shape and run strong agile software engineering teams. For the last three years Lewis has been an AI engineering advocate working to integrate AI and use it as core part of engineering practice.
Most recently he has focused on innovation and AI integration with clients such as WPP, Peabody, and Unitary. A lean and agile practitioner (XP, Scrum, and Kanban), he is product- and delivery-led, brings a DevOps mindset, and combines sharp engineering judgement with confident client-facing communication, lean thinking, and design awareness.
At Odokai he works on the platform and gives clients hands-on support and guidance.
Fractional CTO, CEO, CIO
David Ivy is a board-level technology and digital transformation leader with extensive experience delivering large-scale SaaS platforms, operational transformation programmes, and AI-enabled business initiatives across growth-stage and enterprise environments.
David Ivy is a board-level technology and digital transformation leader with extensive experience delivering large-scale SaaS platforms, operational transformation programmes, and AI-enabled business initiatives across growth-stage and enterprise environments.
As a fractional executive and adviser, David has operated across CEO / CTO / COO / CMO and board advisory / NED roles, helping organisations modernise operations, commercialise technology platforms, improve governance, and scale digital capability. As one of the Founders of dotDigital Group PLC, his background balances commercial views as well as growth and implementation knowledge.
David specialises in translating complex technology into commercially valuable, operational outcomes. He works with organisations moving from fragmented tooling and manual processes toward governed, scalable AI systems, across Start-ups, Scale-ups, and Enterprise PLCs.
With experience supporting businesses through turnaround, optimisation, growth, and exit preparation phases, David brings a commercially grounded perspective to AI adoption, operational efficiency, and platform strategy. He is particularly focused on helping organisations implement AI safely, pragmatically, and with strong governance and infrastructure control.
Areas of expertise include:
You can also connect with David via LinkedIn.
Partner, Advisory
Simon Bird built his first neural network in 1998 while studying Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. Written in C++, it attempted to solve a frequency allocation problem using backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent. It showed a marginal improvement over brute-force algorithms, but it was extremely slow to train. At the time, computers simply did not have the power to run artificial intelligence at a reasonable speed.
Simon Bird built his first neural network in 1998 while studying Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. Written in C++, it attempted to solve a frequency allocation problem using backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent. It showed a marginal improvement over brute-force algorithms, but it was extremely slow to train. At the time, computers simply did not have the power to run artificial intelligence at a reasonable speed.
Fast forward 28 years, and things have changed dramatically. Like many observing the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) such as those powering ChatGPT and Gemini, Simon has been struck by their capabilities. Over the past 18 months, he has focused on bringing himself up to speed with how and why these systems work and, most importantly, how they can be used to benefit businesses.
Prior to this, Simon co-founded dotDigital, a marketing automation and customer data platform. He focused on technology and served on the board in an advisory capacity before retraining as a commercial pilot.
After being introduced to Odokai, Simon asked to join the company in an advisory capacity. He believes the AI landscape today is similar to the internet in 1999: companies recognised its importance and knew they needed to get involved, but lacked the skills and frameworks to use it effectively.
AI Engineering Leader
AJ James, FBCS, is an award-winning technologist, author, and strategic leader with nearly 30 years of experience spanning cloud architecture, digital transformation, and agentic AI. A Fellow of the British Computer Society and winner of DevOps Leader of the Year at the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2019, he has a track record of leading complex modernisation programmes across highly regulated and public-sector environments, delivering measurable reductions in cost and time-to-value.
AJ James, FBCS, is an award-winning technologist, author, and strategic leader with nearly 30 years of experience spanning cloud architecture, digital transformation, and agentic AI. A Fellow of the British Computer Society and winner of DevOps Leader of the Year at the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2019, he has a track record of leading complex modernisation programmes across highly regulated and public-sector environments, delivering measurable reductions in cost and time-to-value. He is the author of Designed4Devops, a practical framework for digital transformation at scale, and today focuses on designing and delivering AI-first platforms and production agentic workflows that create real business value.
CSO
Cliff came into the industry when protecting enterprise data meant tape libraries and a recovery plan nobody had tested. Over two decades he watched the problem change shape without getting easier: virtualisation, cloud, SaaS applications holding data nobody had thought to back up, and eventually ransomware, which turned recovery time into an existential metric. His work centred on cyber resilience: Zero Trust security, layered protection against attack and insider threat, and orchestrated recovery for workloads a business cannot operate without.
Cliff came into the industry when protecting enterprise data meant tape libraries and a recovery plan nobody had tested. Over two decades he watched the problem change shape without getting easier: virtualisation, cloud, SaaS applications holding data nobody had thought to back up, and eventually ransomware, which turned recovery time into an existential metric. His work centred on cyber resilience: Zero Trust security, layered protection against attack and insider threat, and orchestrated recovery for workloads a business cannot operate without.
AI followed a familiar path. Strong demonstrations and enthusiastic pilots stalled because nobody could answer the operational questions underneath them: where the data goes, who can reach which model, what is auditable, and what happens when an automated process does the wrong thing at scale. Cliff had spent his career on those questions.
He now advises leadership teams at the decision stage of evaluating Odokai. He covers what a single governed platform consolidates, what central control of an approved model catalogue means in practice, and which process to point it at first.
Investors & Partners
Odokai is seeking investors and strategic partners as it brings governed operational AI to organisations worldwide. If you want to collaborate with Odokai or explore a partnership, talk to us.
Whether you are evaluating the platform, scoping advisory work, or both, talk to us about fit and next steps.
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