About

I build AI that works for real people in real institutions. Since 2021 I've been at the Department for Business and Trade, leading product on Assist (previously Redbox) and AI Ops — enterprise grade Generative AI services used by over 3,000 civil servants. LLMs, RAG, Knowledge Graphs, multi-agent orchestration — all built to government standards and assessed through GDS service assessment. Track record of building products used by millions.

Early work

I co-founded Moblog in the early 2000s through my company Art Public, one of Europe's first mobile-photo social networks — camera phones posting to the web before that was a thing anyone did. Art Public's clients included Greenpeace, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Comic Relief, and Channel 4.

On the morning of the 7 July 2005 bombings, I launched We're Not Afraid — a site where people could submit photos showing solidarity. Within days, 25,000 images arrived from around the world. It became one of the first large-scale examples of collective citizen response online.

For Channel 4 I created Big Art Mob, a platform that crowdsourced the location of every piece of public art in the world using camera phones. The TV series reached over a million viewers. The project earned three BAFTA nominations, an RTS Innovation Award, and a Civic Trust Award. By 2012 there were over 13,000 verified artworks mapped.

For the 2012 Cultural Olympiad I created Bus-Tops with artist Paula Le Dieu — 30 red LED screens installed on bus shelter rooftops across 20 London boroughs. Passengers on upper decks of double-decker buses could look down and see digital art. The frames were made from trees felled during Olympic construction at Stratford. Anyone in the world could submit artwork via the website.

I won a Webby Award for Britglyph, a nationwide GPS geoglyph that traced letters across the landscape of Britain.

Agency years

At Isobar I worked on product strategy, experience design, and rapid prototyping for clients including Kellogg's, ScottishPower, Toyota, Google, Lego, and IKEA — and helped shape mobile strategy for the UK office. I went on to lead product strategy at POSSIBLE, where my principal client was Specsavers, delivering app strategy and development alongside product management mentorship to their growing product team.

At &us I formed the agency's digital transformation practice around agile principles, running agile design sprints with major pharmaceutical clients across the UK, US, and Switzerland. I then built a coaching platform at The Product Refinery, matching product managers and leaders with vetted expert coaches, and developed the Lean Coaching Canvas framework.

Government

My first government role was a contract at the Department for Business and Trade in 2015, building the Business Profile service that enabled UK businesses to register and be algorithmically matched to potential importers overseas. I returned to DBT full-time in 2021 and have been leading AI enablement since.

That depth — building platforms at scale, working with cultural institutions, leading agency product teams, understanding how people actually use technology — informs everything I do now. Government AI isn't just a technical problem. It's a design problem, a trust problem, and a delivery problem. I've spent my career working at those intersections.

Thought leadership

I'm SC cleared to 2030, a GDS Lead Service Assessor, and available for contract work.

alfied@gmail.com · LinkedIn