I am an Irish technologist based in Dubai. I am the main partner and Chief Technology Officer of Varis Group, a consultancy I founded in 2011 and have built into a team delivering technology strategy, systems design, and AI advisory to clients across the Gulf. I lead that team as both its senior technologist and its commercial principal, which means I have spent the past fifteen years accountable not only for whether the technology works but for whether the business built on it does.

My partner in Varis is Scott Buckley, who serves as our Chief Operating Officer. Scott is from London and brings decades of experience across the construction business, having owned and run many successful ventures of his own. He is different from me in almost every way, and that is precisely why we work: I have long held that the best partner is one whose strengths are your weaknesses and whose weaknesses are your strengths, because one must complement the other for the foundation to hold. Between us sits something rarer than any technical skill: an ownership mentality. We are owners ourselves, and in every engagement we see our role as that of the silent partner who quietly fills the gaps in a client’s ownership team.

Varis grew up in the Internet of Things. For more than a decade we designed and delivered large-scale IoT, smart-building, and guestroom-control systems for the hospitality sector, including the first large-scale Zigbee network deployed in the Middle East and the guestroom technology standards adopted by some of the region’s most prestigious hotel groups. Machine learning, the early working form of AI, was central to that business from the start: it sat at the heart of the energy-savings and sustainability products and services we deployed into hotels, turning millions of sensor events into measurable reductions in consumption. So when I say my practice has moved into AI, it is not a recent conversion. We were putting learning systems into production buildings years before the current wave had a name.

That heritage continues today at the top end of the market. Varis is one of the main consultants on the Palm Exotjca resort project in Kenya, a landmark hotel and residences development on Turtle Bay that will be the first of its kind in the region, where we are listed among the project’s partners alongside international engineering firms such as Buro Happold and Meinhardt (www.palmexotjca.com/partners). We are providing sustainability, lighting design, IT consultancy, and AI consulting to the owning company. The group behind the property is led by individuals we have worked with in the past, and that detail matters more than the logos: the strongest reference a consultancy can hold is the client who, given a bigger project, comes back.

I have worked in hospitality since my early teens, and I spent most of my younger years in the entertainment industry. I have experience in every part of that industry, and my focus within it was always technology. I was responsible for the setup of two of the biggest venues in Ireland, where I not only designed the sound and lighting systems but hired, managed, and actively ran the teams that operated the properties, working directly with the owners throughout. A venue at that scale is an unforgiving teacher: the systems must perform live, every night, in front of a paying crowd, and the people running them must be led, not just managed.

Having worked nearly every role in that business myself, I learned how people work from the inside. I learned, for example, that a long list of experience on a barman’s CV often means he is expert at taking advantage of a business rather than bringing value to it. That kind of reading does not come from a management course. It comes from having stood on the other side of the bar.

One story from the opening of the second venue, back in my home town, says it best. I sat down with one of the owners, a highly successful businessman with little experience of the industry, and told him we needed to allocate a percentage of the marketing budget to the bar staff operation. He looked at me, confused: what on earth did marketing have to do with bar staff? My answer was simple. We had hired the best bar staff in the city for the opening. That meant that on opening night, in the biggest club the town had ever seen, nobody would be left waiting for a drink, and when people went home they would talk about the size, the scale, and above all the fact that the service was flawless. But the most experienced staff in the city are the most experienced at everything, and I could be certain that some of them would be skimming in one way or another, or handing free drinks to their friends. That was the hidden cost of a perfect opening, and I wanted it carried by the marketing budget, because that is exactly what it was buying: word of mouth no advertisement could match. Over the following months we quietly weeded out the bad eggs and replaced them with new staff trained to our way of working. The alternative, opening with green staff and terrible service while everyone figured out how things worked, would have cost the business far more and could never be undone.

That is one example among many, but the shape of it is my career in miniature. Long before I held a CTO title I was already doing the job a CTO actually does: choosing technology under commercial pressure, building teams around it, and answering directly to owners for the result.

The centre of my work now is AI strategy. I advise businesses on how to build continuity into an AI-driven era that is arriving faster than most leadership teams have planned for: which parts of their operation AI will change first, where the real value sits, and, just as importantly, what not to do. The expensive mistakes in this field come from chasing capability without strategy, and my role is to make sure my clients never make one.

A current engagement illustrates the level this operates at. I am working with one of the most prestigious law firms in Saudi Arabia, assisting the owner directly on the strategy for how his firm will transition into the agentic-driven world. In the few months since that engagement began, every point on which he initially pushed back against our assessment of where things are heading has since been verified as correct at the highest levels of government in Saudi Arabia. That is the standard of foresight I hold my own work to: not opinions about the future, but assessments that survive contact with the people shaping it.

Some years ago I served as consulting CTO to one of the UAE’s largest multiservice providers, a business of more than 7,000 staff. When I arrived, the company was absorbing ten to twenty cyber attacks a week. A ransomware attack had recently taken the head office offline for nearly two days. The ERP and payroll system that ran the business had been written, and was privately held, by two in-house developers: nobody outside that pair could access the source code, and the IT manager responsible for the on-site server did not hold the database passwords or even the schema. After the ransomware incident an external security consultant had been brought in, but the support was reactive. When an attack landed it was patched after the fact. Nobody had reviewed the infrastructure from top to bottom or told management what it would genuinely take to secure the environment.

No audit report could fix that. The people holding the keys had every reason to keep holding them, and a formal challenge would only have hardened their position. So the work was done person by person. I built individual relationships with each of the key staff, understood what they wanted from their roles, and gave them reasons to want the change: better tools, more advanced capability, and a future inside the new environment rather than outside it. Over time the company took back control of its own systems. We migrated the closed on-premise estate to the cloud on Microsoft 365, and the rollout of Teams, completed immediately before the pandemic, carried the business through COVID-19 while much of its market stood still.

Alongside that migration, we quietly set the stage for something larger: a completely new ERP system, designed to capture the vast volume of untrackable paper-based transactions flowing through the business every day, transactions that no existing system could see and no manager could measure. The groundwork was laid carefully and without disruption. The programme ultimately ceased when the CEO who sponsored it retired, and that ending taught me a lesson I now build into every engagement: transformation of this kind lives or dies on the sustained commitment of ownership, which is why I insist on alignment at the top before anything else moves.

I tell that story because its shape is common: concentrated knowledge, comfortable incumbents, reactive support, and an ownership team that senses the risk but cannot see inside the system. The answer is rarely confrontation. It is patient, deliberate work with the people involved, run alongside a technical strategy they only encounter once they are ready to support it.

People management and technology are the two core elements of who I am professionally, and I do not separate them. Most technologists learn people late, if at all; I learned both crafts side by side from my teens. Reading a room, earning trust quickly, and moving people without pushing them are not soft extras in this kind of engagement. They are the mechanism by which it succeeds. Engineers open up to someone who respects their work; they close ranks against an auditor. A career spent across both worlds is the reason the transformation described above worked, and it is the rarest part of what I offer.

A snapshot of where Varis is engaged today, with the role noted against each engagement.

Beyond these seats, I have been engaged by Marriott and Accor in Dubai to create guestroom-controls specifications for two of the world’s largest hotel operators, and by Katara Hospitality in Doha, Qatar’s largest hotel owner and operator with a portfolio of more than forty properties across four continents, to create and design its guestroom technology criteria.

As system designer and project technical director, I have delivered guestroom-control and smart-building programmes across a portfolio of hotel projects including the Kempinski Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, the first hotel to receive a LEED retrofit award; Ibis Al Barsha, Dubai; Novotel, Abu Dhabi; the Sheraton Grand Resort in Doha, a flagship property; Al Messila, a Luxury Collection resort in Doha; Ibis Al Seef, Bahrain; and the Sheraton Abuja in Nigeria.

The first phase should be exploratory and deliberately light-touch: understand the platform, the team, and the commercial priorities; assess the real exposure around code ownership, infrastructure, and business continuity; and identify where AI can be introduced in parallel, at low risk, without disturbing anything that already works. Nothing in that phase needs to unsettle the current operation, and it is designed not to. From it, Varis would put in front of you a clear business plan with options, costs, and sequencing, so the decisions stay where they belong: with the three of you.

I would welcome the chance to meet, answer your questions directly, and let you judge the fit for yourselves. Everything above is verifiable, and I am happy to walk through any of it in as much depth as you wish.