Richard Billington

‘Richard believes innovation and ethics must advance together.’

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Richard Billington

Part of the AI Leadership Index – a curated list of the most inspirational figures shaping the AI revolution.

Richard Billington is a technology leader focused on making artificial intelligence genuinely usable for organisations. As CTO of Netcall, he has led the evolution of the Liberty Platform into a unified, enterprise-grade AI ecosystem that helps teams work smarter without technical complexity.

Richard combines deep engineering expertise with a practical, human-centred approach to innovation, focusing on AI capabilities that solve real problems, from knowledge management to workflow automation, and making them accessible through intuitive low-code tools. Under his leadership, Netcall has delivered major innovations including Liberty AI’s Knowledge Management engine, Ask Liberty AI and the Liberty Spark suite, bringing generative AI into everyday work with minimal effort.

With a background spanning software engineering, product strategy and commercial co-founding, Richard has built a reputation for scaling high-impact technology teams and delivering products that customers value. He believes the future of AI lies not in complexity but in thoughtful design, trust and usability - principles that underpin the capabilities he champions.

Please share a case study of how you have you innovated with AI over the last year?

Over the past 12 months, Richard has led the transformation of the Liberty Platform into an integrated suite of AI-powered capabilities, enabling organisations to adopt advanced AI with far greater ease. His focus has been on building a cohesive ecosystem that embeds AI directly into operational workflows rather than delivering isolated features.

This includes the launch of Liberty AI Knowledge Management, which enables organisations to turn collections of documents and data into an instantly searchable knowledge base. Ask Liberty AI uses retrieval-augmented generation to provide accurate, contextual responses grounded in an organisation’s own information.

Richard also led the development of Liberty Spark, a suite that allows users to design, understand and deploy processes using natural language. Tools such as the Spark Process Chatbot, Creator and Igniter transform ideas into working applications, reducing development time from weeks to hours.

On the customer experience side, he oversaw the introduction of the Agent Step, bringing early-stage agentic reasoning to Liberty CX virtual agents. These agents can use tools, query knowledge and determine next actions, improving automation and service delivery.

A guiding principle throughout has been simplicity: AI capabilities can be enabled with minimal integration and without specialist AI teams, allowing councils, banks and enterprises to deliver results quickly. Customer examples include citizen experience improvements at Tewkesbury Borough Council and AI-powered feedback analysis at Hampshire Trust Bank.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced with AI innovation and how you have overcome it?

Richard’s biggest challenge was balancing rapid AI innovation with trust, safety, and simplicity for customers. Building advanced AI is one thing; making it safe, reliable, and easy to adopt is far harder. Customers want the power of large language models without the risks, technical overhead, or integration burdens of enterprise AI. Many lack specialist teams, GPU infrastructure, or time for complex experimentation.

To address this, Richard led a product strategy based on “safe by default, simple by design.” Every Liberty Platform capability follows four principles:

This approach let Netcall deliver advanced features like Knowledge Management, Ask Liberty AI, Spark, and CX agentic reasoning while ensuring safe, confident, and effortless adoption. The result is a platform combining cutting-edge AI with genuine accessibility.

How do you balance innovation with ethical safeguards?

Richard believes innovation and ethics must advance together. His approach blends personal leadership with strict AI governance.

Personally, he champions responsible design: enhancing work rather than replacing it, ensuring transparency, and prioritizing user trust over technical novelty. Teams are encouraged to innovate boldly but never recklessly.

At the platform level, Liberty AI embeds strong safeguards. Customer data is never used for training, logs are short-lived, and multiple moderation layers prevent unsafe outputs or prompt manipulation. Privacy is maintained through secure, isolated processing and a strict “least data, least time” approach.

By building these controls into the architecture rather than retrofitting them, Richard enables rapid innovation without compromising safety. The result: a platform where customers adopt AI confidently, with every feature secure, explainable, and governed by design.

How do you believe the artificial intelligence space will change over the next 12-24 months?

Richard believes the next two years will mark a shift from AI experimentation to true enterprise maturity. Organisations will move beyond isolated pilots, embedding AI across teams, workflows, and digital experiences.

This requires platforms that make AI easy, safe, and fully integrated, removing the friction that has slowed adoption. Generative AI, RAG, and agentic workflows will become standard features within business applications, not separate specialist tools. Hybrid models, including self-hosted options, will give organisations more control over data and cost.

AI assistants will evolve into operational co-workers, reasoning across processes, recommending actions, and orchestrating systems. Vendors offering simple adoption paths and integrated AI in low-code environments, will drive this transition. The winners won’t be those with the largest models, but those who make AI genuinely usable in daily work.