Q&A with rising star Hannah Hugues of Hymans Robertson, AI and Software Development Awards

‘The biggest challenge for me has been reining in my own enthusiasm’

Hannah Hughes is a finalist in the Software Rising Star of the Year category in Computing’s AI and Software Development Awards.

Hannah is a Developer in the Insights and Analytics team at Hymans Robertson, with a background in Mechanical Engineering.

Hannah has played a central role in advancing the firm’s practical adoption of AI - translating early experimentation into tools, workflows, and developer-focused improvements that make day-to-day delivery faster and more reliable. As an active contributor to the AI Champions community, she regularly shares insights on model behaviour, prompt patterns, and the integration of agent-based tooling across development environments.

What would winning this award mean to you?

Winning this award would mean a lot to me personally, but it would also be a shared achievement of the whole Hymans Robertson team. The company gave me the space to turn my enthusiasm for AI into something genuinely useful, so any recognition would also reflect the support of the team around me. I still get moments of imposter syndrome in a field that moves this quickly, but when I look back at what we’ve built this year, I feel genuinely proud. Winning would feel like a real milestone and encouragement to keep putting that energy into work that benefits both me and the wider team.

What is your proudest achievement over the past year?

One of the things I am proudest of this year is turning enthusiasm into something other people could genuinely use. Hymans Robertson has put a lot of work into creating an AI positive culture, with AI champions across the business sharing ideas and experimenting together. Recently, I shared a proof of concept for a new AI agent skill with that group, and not long after someone told me they had taken it further and were already using it to improve how their team worked. I found that really rewarding, both because it created real impact and because it connected me with someone I probably would not have worked with otherwise.

What has been the biggest challenges of the year so far, and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that What is your/your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

The biggest challenge for me has been reining in my own enthusiasm which is a nice problem to have! I’ve tried a lot this year and some things stuck while plenty didn’t. As part of that I’ve learned discipline in asking "but is this genuinely useful?" before sinking a lot of my time into something. My team and the wider digital community have been really valuable here by sharing what we’ve tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t. Bringing people along on that journey is its own challenge, but when it works it's rewarding.

What do you see as the main opportunities for your industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on them?

The biggest opportunity is agentic AI, moving from systems that answer questions to systems that can do work for us. The real potential is in reducing friction, speeding up routine tasks, and giving people more time for higher value thinking. For example, instead of waiting for a developer to check an error log, an agent could spot the problem, summarise it clearly and even raise a PR with a proposed fix ready for review. That is the area I am most excited to keep exploring, experimenting with, and helping shape as it becomes part of our day-to-day work.

What are the key demands you have seen from your customers (either internal or external) in the last 12 months?

AI is rapidly raising everyone's expectations. Small frustrations are getting smoothed away in everyday life, like a smarter search or a tool that anticipates what you need, which means people's tolerance for clunky manual processes elsewhere starts to shrink. Internally, I've noticed colleagues who have a gut feeling that something in their workflow is broken and a sense that AI could fix it but aren't sure how to get there. That's one of the most exciting things I'm seeing, and it's shifting what developers do. Less purely building things and more helping people figure out what they actually need.

Which new technology trend are you placing your bets on?

Agent-first development. The developer's role is shifting from writing every line to translating requirements into something agents can run with, more shepherding than doing. To get there though, the foundations have to be solid. Good test suites are going to matter more than ever since they're our guardrails. The more we hand off to agents, the more we need to trust what comes back. It's not always the glamorous part but getting that right now feels like the smartest bet.