Mike Downing

Part of the IT Leaders 100 - a list of the most influential IT leaders in the UK in 2025.

An accomplished CTO and CIO with a proven track record in the financial services sector, Michael specialises in delivering innovative, industry-leading solutions. He is recognised for his thought leadership, including conference presentations and advisory roles across various organisations.

Michael possesses in-depth expertise in artificial intelligence and its practical applications, with a strong passion for hands-on software development using Databricks and Python, particularly in leveraging LLMs and Agentic AI.

He holds several strategic and technical advisory roles, both formal and informal, with a diverse range of Insurtechs, startups and scale-ups, leveraging his extensive experience in the industry.

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

The pace of change in the last few years as AI becomes increasingly capable, and carrying out ideation of where AI can be implemented in order to improve productivity across the business.

What do you consider your greatest IT achievement of the last 12 months?

Bringing into production back-office automation solutions that the team has built internally using langchain, langgraph and foundation models to have teams of AI agents working collectively to perform processing, validation and adjudication on various work streams.

What's the biggest challenge facing IT leaders today, and how are you tackling it?

Governance, ensuring all aspects of IT fit within appropriate controls and frameworks, be they security, operational resilience, environmental standards or regulation. Tackling it as a team with appropriate education and support from around the business especially legal, compliance and internal audit.

What piece of technology could you not live without, and why?

My Apple Macbook Pro, it's my research machine, off company networks where I can explore and learn new skills and approaches in order to bring them back in house. This eliminates risk and drives innovation.

What excites you most about the future of IT?

The forthcoming convergence of quantum computing and AGI, the possibilities that these two technologies bring is beyond our imagination. We must work as an industry to prepare for this with education, training and a growth mindset so that we can embrace the possibilities to drive business value.

What’s the strangest job you’ve ever had?

Van driver. Well, it was summer holidays from university, and it was enjoyable at the time.

If you could instantly master one new skill, what would it be?

Touch typing: in a forthcoming world where English language prompts are key to work with AI agents, being able to type faster will increase my personal productivity in orchestrating agentic AI. It is interesting in an advanced world that some old skills we have forgotten become more important.