Louis Brook

Part of the IT Leaders 100 - a list of the most influential IT leaders in the UK in 2026.

Louis Brook is CTO of Instem, a life‑science software business, where he leads product and platform engineering teams as well as corporate/enterprise and cybersecurity functions, focused on building compliant, data‑driven platforms that accelerate scientific R&D.

Louis' role centres on building and operating SaaS products for the biomedical and pharmaceutical sector whilst ensuring the wider business has the tools in place to drive efficiency and growth, in a safe and secure environment.

A champion of agentic AI, Louis is passionate about increasing delivery velocity while maintaining trust, security and regulatory rigor.

What's the most exciting part of your current role?

The most thrilling part of my role has to be exciting my teams to build leading software that accelerates scientific discovery and, ultimately the production of life-enhancing drugs. As CTO at Instem, I get to connect frontline scientific needs of big pharma with modern engineering; scaling cloud platforms, applying AI responsibly, and delivering products that reduce time‑to‑insight for customers in highly regulated environments.

The blend of real‑world impact, deep tech, and leading purpose-driven teams is what energises me most.

What do you do in week one of a new project to avoid pain in month six?

My focus is on clarity and alignment: define the outcome(s), success metrics, and the riskiest assumptions.

Defining scope boundaries, agreeing the non‑negotiables/functionals (security, compliance, performance) is helpful, but equally I love to agree the stakeholder show & tell cadence, to ensure the direction is right whilst moving at pace; the best deliveries don't have a month six, they iterate and build releasable value quickly to prevent that disappointment risk — and the quicker a thin end‑to‑end slice can be built to prove integration, the more confidence you build with stakeholders.

There are also the formalities: establishing ownership, decision rights, and a delivery cadence. That early alignment and technical proof‑of‑life prevents the hidden risk that usually bites in month six.

What’s the part of your estate you most want to simplify in 2026?

In 2026, the key simplification is our platform estate: completing the modernisation of a core legacy SaaS product, finishing our remaining cloud migrations, and putting a consistent data backbone across our products. That reduces duplication, simplifies operations, and gives us a single source of truth for analytics and AI so we and our customers can move faster while staying compliant.

Excluding smartphones, what piece of technology could you not live without and why?

My secret side project is my home automation - I think it relieves the frustrated engineer in me that needs to stay dormant at work for everyone's sanity. Over the past year, however, my automation efforts have really focused on agentic AI at home, with OpenClaw & Claude Code rapidly becoming my desert island tech.

It offloads admin for sure, but is increasingly solving challenges autonomously, and when it interacts with my other home tech I get the full Jetsons experience.

What excites you most about the future of IT?

Linked to my last answer: it is simply where the latest AI developments will take us. The technology today is already radically increasing the pace of delivery for my teams, shifting IT from building tools to orchestrating outcomes.

The way we interact with technology is moving from 'clicking software' to delegating intent to systems that can reason, plan and act. That will reshape not just the tech landscape, but many roles in both workplace and society over time; automating routine work, augmenting expert judgment, and creating entirely new jobs around supervision, safety, and human‑AI collaboration.

For IT leaders, it's surely a once‑in‑a‑generation shift of internet-proportions.

What talent are you quietly proud of that would never show up on LinkedIn?

As well as my ability to automate the most trivial of home routines into something so overly complicated nobody can use it, I'm quietly most proud of bringing light‑heartedness into the day‑to‑day; a bit of humour to keep teams human while trying very hard not to drift into full David Brent territory.

What’s your most-used keyboard shortcut or command that you wish everyone knew?

I've got two, and they're both for mac users (sorry MS shops): Option+Command+Space for new [smart] finder window (for those coming from Windows, it's the only out-of-the-box replacement for Win+E).

And the second essential shortcut is Option+Command+Esc to force quit your unresponsive app!