What I learned on my way to becoming a Top 100 Tech Leader

From winning a University of Hertfordshire enterprise competition to being named one of the UK's Top 100 Tech Leaders, AI Caramba! CEO – and Herts graduate - Matthew Blakemore reflects on the lessons, setbacks and unlikely opportunities that shaped his career in artificial intelligence.

When I was named among the Top 100 Influential People last year, the moment that came to my mind wasn’t a stage or a headline. It was a small panel room at the University of Hertfordshire, a dozen years earlier.

There I pitched a fashion-tech idea to the judges of Flare, the university’s competition that helps students and alumni turn early ideas into funded businesses. I walked away with £8,000 and, more importantly, the belief that I could actually build something.

That thread runs through everything I have done since. Across a decade of building AI strategy, product development and governance for organisations, governments and international bodies, and more than 250 keynotes in over 20 countries, I keep returning to a handful of things that the University of Hertfordshire taught me. Three of them stand out.

One - Reinvest in the people and places that back you early

Before Hertfordshire ever funded a business of mine, it taught me how to work. I rowed for the university, which meant being on the water before dawn, pulling my weight so the rest of the crew never had to carry me, and turning up again the next morning regardless of how the last outing had gone.

I did not appreciate it at the time, but that was the first place I learned what teamwork and discipline actually meant – and cost. Those habits have mattered more in a boardroom than almost anything I could put on my CV.

Herts’ entrepreneurial competition, Flare, came later, and it gave me more than money. It was a vote of confidence at a point when I had neither a track record nor a safety net. It would have been easy to take the funding, move on, and never look back. Instead I kept returning: guest lecturing on entrepreneurship and AI, and coming back regularly to speak to the international business students - the subject in which I graduated.

I have come to see this as a discipline rather than a courtesy. Technology careers reward people who chase the next stage, the next client, the next headline. But the people who back you before you are anyone tend to be the ones who still matter decades later. Whoever gives you your first cheque, your first yes, your first invitation to speak deserves more than a thank you email. They deserve you showing up again.

Two - Credibility is built in years, not headlines

None of the work I am proudest of happened quickly. The AI video classification system I invented and patented at a media and entertainment organisation was turned down for Innovate UK funding twice before it was approved on the third attempt. The international AI data lifecycle standard I helped write (ISO/IEC 8183) took four years of work – I was one of its sub-editors - before it was adopted by ISO in 2023 and by the European Committee for Standardisation a year later.

Neither of those would have made a compelling story at the time they were happening. They were long periods with rejected drafts, committee calls and unglamorous revisions. But the credentials that genuinely change how people treat you, a patent, a standard that governments rely on, a seat at a policy table, are almost never won on the first attempt. If you measure your progress only by what is visible this quarter, you will walk away right before the work that matters starts to compound.

Three - Your unlikely combinations are your real edge

I have written songs since I was a teenager, every lyric and melody my own and never AI-generated, and I make AI-assisted films alongside my work in AI. For a long time I kept all of that apart from my day job building AI strategy, governance and technology for organisations and regulators. That was a mistake.

Thinking constantly about what makes a piece of music or writing into something that is genuinely mine has sharpened how I think about authorship, originality and fairness in AI, and those arguments now run straight through the strategy work I do for clients, the standards I help shape, and a book that grew directly out of the tension.

The tech sector has no shortage of people who are excellent at one thing. What it lacks is people willing to let two unrelated disciplines argue in their own head until something new falls out. Whatever your version of songwriting is, the pursuit that looks like it has nothing to do with your career, do not wall it off. It is very likely your real edge.

None of this happened in a straight line, and much of it did not feel significant while it was happening. But I can trace nearly all of it back to a small group of people at Hertfordshire that chose to take a chance on an idea.

If there is a fourth lesson beneath the other three, it is this: back people early, the way this university backed me. You can never tell, in the room, which cheque will be the one someone is still building on decades later.

Matthew Blakemore is an award-winning AI strategist, entrepreneur and public speaker with expertise in digital transformation. He advises national AI initiatives, has led innovative AI projects with industry and academia, creates award-winning AI films, and regularly speaks at major international conferences on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. He studied International Business at Herts.