AI & ML Contractor

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 teams built from zero. Every production AI application pen tested clean.

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What I do 01 / 04

Contracting

Full stack AI and ML delivery, from data engineering and cloud infrastructure through to production models and front-end applications. I build the pipeline, train the model, deploy it, and own the outcome. Background in actuarial risk and pricing means I have been shipping ML with direct P&L impact since 2012. 3 to 12 month engagements, full or part time.

Fractional Head of AI

Senior AI leadership 2 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 Series A to C companies that need a proven AI leader without the full-time overhead.

Consulting

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

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 experience 04 / 04
Jan 2026 to Jun 2026
Native · Insurance Broker

Head of Data and AI

  • 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 company's AI Security Council. Authored all 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.
Oct 2024 to Dec 2025
Williams Lea · Legal & Banking Services

Head of ML and Data Science CoE

  • 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 using OpenAI, NVIDIA and Claude Sonnet. Automated job estimation and real-time allocation using XGBoost and Prophet.
Oct 2022 to Oct 2024
Superscript · Insurtech

Head of Data / Head of Data Science and AI

  • Rapidly expanded the team. Evangelised data science from scratch across the business, embedding ML into product, commercial and operational decision-making.
  • Built a real-time data platform scoring customer behaviour and recommending next best actions. Deployed locally hosted LLMs with RAG for automated customer advice.
  • ML assistant prefilled broker quote forms, achieving 100% improvement in form return rate and cutting return time by over a week. Personally showcased AI work to investors, contributing to $60M Series B.
Jan 2021 to Oct 2022
Superscript · Insurtech

Lead Data Scientist

  • 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.
  • Classified 40,000+ insurance documents using topic modelling and BERT-based NER. Built searchable tagging system and automated classification pipeline in Google Drive.
  • Built a bespoke BI tool with statistical and ML functionalities, facilitating 50+ A/B tests across the business.
Jan 2019 to Jan 2021
Simply Business · Insurance

Data Scientist

  • Built a Neo4j-based tool to visualise insurance acceptance criteria, directly resulting in three new products.
  • Introduced ML-based lead scoring, boosting conversion rate by over 5 percentage points. Built ML-driven bot detection software, curtailing bot activity and protecting data integrity.
  • Developed transcription and neural network-based QA compliance software, improving quality assurance by over 200%.
Jan 2016 to Jan 2019
Simply Business · Insurance

Senior Pricing Manager

  • Led all new business price optimisation constituting 80% of total company revenue.
  • Transitioned from GLMs to gradient boosting machines, adding nearly £400k annually.
2012 to 2016
Barclays · RSA · Esure · British Gas

Risk, Pricing and Data Analysis

  • Risk modelling and pricing across insurance and energy. Built GLM-based claim frequency and severity models, customer analytics, and predictive payment models using SAS, SQL and Emblem.
2009 to 2012
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.
Contact

Let's build something that holds up under scrutiny.

Available for contract, fractional, and consulting engagements through Monochrome Intelligence Ltd. Regulated industries welcome. Outside IR35 only. The first conversation is free.

Email Tom
Email tom@monochromeintelligence.com Phone 07717 090501
Location Northamptonshire · Remote / London
Company Monochrome Intelligence Ltd