Mike Weston

Mike Weston is Head of AI Faculty at Sparta Global, setting the direction of the AI learning portfolio within the AI & Tech Institute and the standard its programmes are built to. He works from a simple premise: AI amplifies whatever organisational capability it finds. Strong management gets stronger, weak process gets exposed faster. That view shapes how the faculty designs its courses, with as much attention on judgement, context and working practice as on the tools.

Mike came to AI after 30 years in digital. He founded Digital Oxygen in 2003, working in online video before most of the market had the bandwidth for it. As CEO of Profusion he grew the data science consultancy from £1.2m to £6m, with clients including HSBC, Carphone Warehouse and Kingfisher. From 2019 to 2023 he co-wrote and acted as subject matter expert for Digital Transformation Lead, a master’s-level executive programme built by OpenClassrooms on licensed Stanford Online curricula. He was later AI domain lead at Multiverse, responsible for a portfolio of AI and Data programmes and for meeting the standards set by learners, their employers and the Department for Education.

He spent five years as a technology commentator on BBC World News, and has spoken at conferences and run leadership sessions at Vodafone Three, ITN and the John Lewis Partnership. He is writing Amplifier, a book on how AI magnifies the quality of leadership, decision-making and culture. The same thinking produced two frameworks now used with clients: REIMAGINE, which maps the six organisational conditions that determine whether AI amplifies a business’s strengths or its dysfunction, and the Operational Drag Diagnostic, which identifies the friction absorbing capacity before any tool is bought. Both are built for organisations stuck between AI pilots and anything that changes how the work gets done.

At Sparta Global, Mike works across the AI curriculum and the people who teach it. He reviews programmes against what clients are actually asking for, puts new AI tools through real teaching use before they reach learners, and spends as much time on how the faculty teaches as on what it covers. His test for any programme is whether a Spartan can do the work in their first week on a client site.

Outside work he lives in South West London, bakes sourdough with more precision than the process strictly requires, and has recently taken up yoga.