Lewis Crook.
My story
I dropped out of college when I was 17, because my grades were so bad because of my attendance. I was a labourer and I was miserable. I knew I had more to give.
So I made a phone call to the company I worked for and said to the receptionist, "Hey, do you have any IT jobs? I work on your building site as a labourer." She kind of laughed. The next minute I get a phone call from the director of IT, who gave me an apprenticeship.
Then when I was about 22 I started specialising as a VoIP engineer, covering enterprise scale deployments of Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams for some of the biggest brands in energy and financial services.
And then I started freelancing, had my own agency where I had to learn pre-sales, and ran my own companies for ten years, before having my daughter, moving back to Europe and feeling like it was time to rejoin a leading AI company, because I really missed collaborating with the smartest minds in the world. And so here I am, as the Lead Solutions Engineer for Northern Europe (UK, Ireland and the Nordics) at Parloa.
- Lead Solutions Engineer for Northern Europe (UK, Ireland and the Nordics) at Parloa
- 20 years in enterprise tech as an infrastructure engineer, solutions architect, technical consultant and in presales
- Closed seven-figure tech deals across my career
How I think about AI
AI presents thoughts, presumptions and inferences as fact, but it does it so confidently that you can't trust the outputs. Everybody gets stung by it, trusting it too easily and then finding out it's completely wrong. You have to be able to work with AI and trust its outputs, never 100% of course, but for the most part, certainly. If you can't, it not only slows you down but can also just get you in trouble.
How my Claude setup fits together
Outside work
I think I've got a pretty good balance, but it's always top of mind and I don't always get it right.
This is my own site and the views are my own. Parloa doesn't sponsor or review it.