A note from PorthouseDean’s CTO

Dr Guy Marshall

Chief Technology Officer · PhD · MA (Cantab) · CMath · FIMA · FRSA

Thinking about joining us as a VIP partner? One of the things you get is thirty minutes of my time. We spend it on a single, honest question: where could AI take real work off your desk — and where couldn’t it? Almost no practice your size gets that look without a sales pitch attached. This one comes without.

Before you take it up, you should know who’s doing the review. So here’s a bit about me, and how it works.

Who I am

I’m a mathematician by training — Cambridge, a master’s in theoretical physics at King’s College London, then a doctorate in AI at Manchester, where I’m a Simon Fellow and a Turing-funded researcher. I’m a Chartered Mathematician and a Fellow of the IMA and the RSA.

Most of my research isn’t about building cleverer models. It’s about how people understand and trust them — the part that matters when you’re deciding whether some technology is worth the bother. I’ve advised companies on tech since 2015, and run the technology side of PorthouseDean since 2022. So I’m not a consultant selling a product. I’ve already rebuilt the quoting, the admin and the turnaround inside a busy engineering firm. I know which of it paid off, and which didn’t.

Much of my recent work is in housing. I founded HousingAI.org and sit on the board of One Manchester, a housing association. It’s the same job I’d do for you: find where AI genuinely earns its place. Housing isn’t your world exactly, but it’s the next street over — real buildings, real budgets, real residents. The quiet wins and the expensive dead ends carry straight across to a practice like yours.

How the review works

Three parts. It costs you nothing but the half hour.

1. You tell me how the practice runs

   A short form. What software you use, where your week goes, and the jobs that eat time — chasing planning, redrawing the same details, writing the same letters.

2. I do the analysis

   I match your answers against what AI can realistically do today. You get a shortlist of opportunities, each weighed for effort against payback. Only the honest ones make the list.

3. We talk for thirty minutes

   I walk you through it in plain English — what’s worth doing, what to ignore, what it would take. Your questions, your practice. No slides, no sales call afterwards.

Why I recommend it

Most practices your size are sitting on a fortnight of admin a year they could hand back to themselves. Nearly everyone tells them the fix is some expensive platform. Usually it isn’t. Usually it’s two or three small, dull, specific things — a quoting step, a chasing job, a document that could write its own first draft.

I’d rather spend half an hour telling you which two or three than sell you a system you don’t need. And if the honest answer is ‘not much yet’, I’ll say so.

You run a lean practice: get the client through planning and building regs, keep it simple, keep it moving. That’s the lens I’ll bring. Nothing recommended for its own sake. Nothing you’d need a technical team to run.