Rich Bushnell

I founded Partner in the Loop because I kept seeing the same problem from the inside. As Head of AI Centre of Excellence at SEFE Group, I built and led the company’s first AI CoE, engaging over 200 people across nine AI domains. I partnered with Microsoft on enterprise-scale Copilot deployment. I aligned governance with the EU AI Act before most organisations had started thinking about it. And through all of that, one thing became clear: the biggest risk to AI adoption was not the technology. It was the gap between what leadership teams were being sold and what they actually understood about the decisions they were making.

Regulated industries face a particular version of this problem. Vendors arrive with confident promises. Internal teams push for speed. Boards hear about competitive pressure and feel they need to act. But nobody in the room is asking the hard questions about accountability, about what happens when an AI system makes a decision that a regulator wants explained, or when a customer is harmed by an automated process that nobody fully owns. The governance conversation either happens too late or gets delegated to compliance teams who lack the commercial context to make it useful.

My background gave me a perspective that sits between these worlds. I studied Physics at the University of Manchester, spent years in enterprise technology delivery, and led a major programme replacing legacy billing systems at SEFE Energy. That combination of scientific rigour, hands-on technical experience, and commercial programme leadership means we understand both the engineering reality and the boardroom reality. I have sat in both rooms, and I know how rarely they speak the same language.

AI governance is a leadership challenge, not a technology challenge. The organisations that get this right will be the ones whose leaders ask the right questions before committing resources, whose boards understand what they are accountable for, and whose governance frameworks are built around commercial reality rather than abstract principles. That is what Partner in the Loop exists to support: helping senior leaders make defensible AI decisions with clarity about the trade-offs involved.

We work independently because independence is the point. No vendor partnerships, no referral fees, no technology preferences. When we assess an AI decision, the only interest we represent is yours. That is not a marketing position. It is the structural foundation of everything we do.