AI & ML Consulting · Training · Mentoring

Tom Cooper.

15+ years shipping ML systems with real financial consequences across insurance, fintech, legal and banking. Full stack from data engineering to deployed model. Three AI functions built from zero. I consult, I build, and I teach. I'm at my best doing all three at once.

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What I do 01 / 04

Consulting

Short, focused, day-rate engagements scoped to an outcome: AI roadmaps, technical due diligence, model risk reviews, AI security assessments, and data protection strategy for teams operating under regulation. I also design and build bespoke AI products from the ground up, not just advise on them. Deep domain expertise in insurance, legal, fintech and banking.

Fractional AI Leadership

Senior AI leadership 1 to 3 days per week: strategy, hiring, architecture, delivery, and the AI security and governance layer most teams skip until it is too late. I have founded AI security councils, led red teaming programmes, and built compliance frameworks from scratch in regulated environments. Ideal for companies that need a proven AI leader without the full-time overhead.

Training & Workshops

Practical AI training delivered by someone who ships it, not someone who read about it. One-day workshops and multi-session programmes for engineering, data and leadership teams: what modern AI can actually do, how to build with it safely, and how to tell substance from hype. Also available for guest lectures and conference sessions.

Mentoring & Tutoring

One-to-one sessions for data scientists levelling up, engineers moving into ML, and professionals whose careers are colliding with AI. Machine learning, Python, statistics, and the unwritten rules of production AI, taught the way industry actually does it. Online, flexible scheduling, from a single session to a structured programme.

Key outcomes 02 / 04
$60M Series B secured. AI roadmap and investor presentations contributed directly
£500k+ Annual revenue from bespoke price optimisation software. HMRC R&D recognised
3× AI and data science functions built from zero and grown into high-performing teams
40k+ Regulated insurance documents classified, structured and made searchable in production
100% Form return rate uplift via ML-guided extraction. Return time cut by over a week
Skills 03 / 04

AI / ML

  • LLMs & RAG pipelines
  • Agentic AI & MCP
  • Embeddings & vector search
  • Prompt engineering
  • XGBoost & GLMs
  • NLP & NER
  • Price optimisation
  • Real-time ML

Cloud / Infra

  • AWS Bedrock & SageMaker
  • AWS Lambda, EC2, VPC, IAM
  • GCP Vertex AI & Cloud Run
  • GCP BigQuery & Cloud Build
  • Terraform & CloudFormation
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • dbt & data engineering

Languages & Frameworks

  • Python
  • SQL
  • TypeScript / React / Vite
  • FastAPI & Django
  • Neo4j
  • dbt

AI Security

  • AI security council founding
  • LLM red teaming
  • Prompt injection & jailbreaking
  • Data exfiltration testing
  • Agentic AI risk assessment
  • Supply chain vulnerability
  • Regulatory compliance frameworks

Domain Expertise

  • Insurance (pricing, underwriting)
  • Fintech & banking
  • Legal & RegTech
  • Regulated industry governance
  • Responsible AI adoption
  • Series B fundraising
  • Investor communication
Selected engagements 04 / 04

Roles and engagements have included the following. Organisations anonymised as a matter of course. A full CV with named employers, dates and references is available on request.

UK Insurance Broker

Data & AI platform, governance, and product build-out

  • Built the full data and cloud infrastructure from the ground up on GCP: ingestion pipelines, transformation layer with dbt on BigQuery, BI tooling, VPC networking, IAM, and Cloud Run and Compute Engine environments across sandbox, development and production.
  • Founded the organisation's AI Security Council. Authored its governance materials, defined security review processes for agentic AI tooling, and led engagement with external compliance consultants.
  • Designed and built three full stack AI products. One was demoed to brokers and received strong positive feedback from the market.
Global Legal & Banking Services Provider

Founded ML & data science centre of excellence

  • Founded the data science function and centre of excellence. Led a direct team and directed an R&D function of nearly 60 people. Secured executive buy-in by translating technical capability into commercial language.
  • Developed agentic AI framework on AWS Bedrock and delivered two proof-of-concepts automating complex legal and banking workflows, both advancing to MVP.
  • Became the go-to for data protection and AI compliance across the organisation. Built transcription and dictation AI for legal and banking institutions. Automated job estimation and real-time allocation using XGBoost and Prophet.
Series B Insurtech

Built the data science & AI function from zero

  • Founded and grew the data science function, embedding ML into product, commercial and operational decision-making. Personally showcased the AI work to investors, contributing to a $60M Series B raise.
  • Designed and built bespoke price optimisation software from the ground up, contributing over £500k in additional annual revenue. Formally recognised as innovation under HMRC's R&D tax relief scheme.
  • Built a real-time platform scoring customer behaviour and recommending next best actions. Deployed locally hosted LLMs with RAG for automated customer advice. An ML assistant prefilling broker quote forms doubled form return rates and cut return time by over a week.
  • Classified 40,000+ insurance documents using topic modelling and BERT-based NER, and built a bespoke BI tool facilitating 50+ A/B tests across the business.
Leading UK SME Insurer

Pricing leadership & applied ML across the business

  • Led all new business price optimisation, constituting 80% of total company revenue. Transitioned pricing from GLMs to gradient boosting machines, adding nearly £400k annually.
  • Introduced ML-based lead scoring, boosting conversion rate by over 5 percentage points. Built ML-driven bot detection software protecting data integrity, and neural network-based QA compliance software improving quality assurance by over 200%.
  • Built a Neo4j-based tool to visualise insurance acceptance criteria, directly resulting in three new products.
Major UK Banks, Insurers & Energy

Risk, pricing and data analysis

  • Risk modelling and pricing across banking, insurance and energy. Built GLM-based claim frequency and severity models, customer analytics, and predictive payment models using SAS, SQL and Emblem.
University of Brighton

Mathematics, BSc (First Class)

  • Dissertation: predicting cardiovascular disorders using logistic regression, with multimodal and ordinal extensions to predict specific disease type and severity. Predictive modelling with real-world clinical consequences from day one.
  • Number theory, topology, real and complex analysis, linear and nonlinear optimisation, epidemiology, survival analysis.
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Contact

Let's build something that holds up under scrutiny.

Available for consulting, fractional AI leadership, corporate training, and 1:1 mentoring through Monochrome Intelligence Ltd. Regulated industries welcome. Outside IR35 only. The first conversation is free.

Email tom@monochromeintelligence.com
Location Northamptonshire · Remote / London
Company Monochrome Intelligence Ltd