About us

We help organisations adopt and scale AI safely, by design.

EBM is a UK-registered SME. Our team has extensive experience of working across the UK public and private sector to develop and deploy technology at scale. We combine that experience with our own patent-pending solution to help organisations capitalise on the growing benefits of Agentic AI, without adding significant further risk.

UK-registered SME
registered in England and Wales
Cyber Essentials Plus
certified

Our purpose

To lay the foundations that let UK and global organisations adopt and exploit AI securely.

We reduce the risk AI introduces to government and private enterprises, without constraining or slowing its adoption.

Our vision

To be a trusted partner to government and industry, helping to set the standard for safe AI agents.

We're shifting AI safety away from restrictive, after-the-fact guardrails and manual audits, towards AI with safeguards built in by design.

Leadership team

Experienced leaders, focused on safe AI.

Johnny Gilbert

Chief Executive Officer

Johnny has spent his career helping mission-critical organisations grow and transform through the application of new technology and solutions across the UK defence, security and wider public sector. He joined EBM after almost 15 years at PA Consulting, where he was a Partner and Global Head of Strategy and Economic Consulting. He is a chartered engineer who began his career as a British Army officer and then at BAE Systems.

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Doug Ayres

Founder (EBM)

Doug is a serial tech entrepreneur who loves spotting unique opportunities and building technical solutions to match. He sold his first agency to Interpublic Group in 2011, went on to launch AI consultancy Filament AI in 2016, and steered the demerger in 2023 after securing a major funding raise for Filament (now DealEngine). He's incredibly passionate about what we're building here and is fully focused on bringing our technology to the world.

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Claire Fletcher-Hobbs

Co-Founder (EBM) and COO

Claire has over 20 years' experience leading teams to deliver digital solutions, spanning project management and product development. She has overseen the delivery and deployment of AI solutions for clients including HSBC and Rentokil Initial, and leads the strategy, deployment and adoption of the solutions we develop with clients.

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Bill Pearson

Lead AI Researcher & Engineer

With over 40 years of software development experience, and the past three and a half years spent solely on designing and building agentic systems, Bill has deep knowledge of AI development and the challenges it poses. Understanding those challenges led him to invent Handles, the patent-pending, ontology-backed capability security model at the heart of EBM AxiOS, and to lead its research and development.

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Richard Turner

Head of AI Engineering

Richard leads our development team with a focus on AI safety. He has over 20 years of experience in quantitative research and systematic trading. Previously, Richard was Managing Director at Mesirow Currency Management and Director of Research at The Cambridge Strategy. He also held research roles at Credit Suisse, RBS, JP Morgan, and Asymmetric Investment Management. Richard holds a BSc from Nottingham and an MSc from King's College London. He is a Chartered Accountant with a Certificate in Quantitative Finance.

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Andreas Hajialeandrou

Legal & Commercial Director

Andreas spent 27 years as Director/Partner at major investment banks (HSBC, Lehman Bros, ISM Capital), managing complex convertible bond trading and risk systems. Leveraging combined technical and legal expertise, he now focuses on assisting SMEs with growth strategies, corporate structuring, financing, and IP management.

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Peter Lacy

Chairman

Peter spent 25+ years at McKinsey and then at Accenture, where he sat on the Global Management Committee and was the firm's first Chief Sustainability Officer and Chief Responsibility Officer. He has led the world's largest CEO study for United Nations Secretary-Generals, bringing a deep understanding of how to help businesses thrive through new technology adoption while managing implementation risk. He founded the World Economic Forum's Digital Transformation of Industries programme and is CEO of Kaleidoscopes Group and Chair of DRIFT Energy. A published author and former Business Fellow at Oxford's Smith School, he brings board-level experience across strategy, AI, data and tech security.

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Careers

Join a team building safe AI.

We're building a team of engineers, architects and business specialists who share one conviction: AI has the potential to transform our world but it's only as valuable as the confidence you can place in it. Here's what we stand for.

Interested in exploring a career with us? Reach out and tell us about yourself.

Positive principles

We want to make a positive impact, and aim for our business practices and services to meet the highest standards possible. This covers the organisations and people who we work with as well as the planet.

We're proud to work with Ecologi to support climate action. See our progress

Clients first

We're confident in our team and our technology. Rather than watching what others do, we put our clients' needs first and are committed to helping them deliver the best outcomes for the people they serve.

Diverse talents

We're committed to a diverse, inclusive team that understands and reflects the organisations and communities we work with.

Fair working

Hybrid working, flexible hours and unlimited holiday help us hire the best people and give them a healthy work-life balance.

Talk to the team building safe AI.

Whether you're exploring, building or aligning AI, we'd like to hear from you.

Arrange a briefing