The person behind the practice
“I’ve held senior data leadership roles and know what it’s like to sit in the chair.”
I’m Nick, an independent data and AI strategy consultant with more than 15 years of experience spanning hands-on delivery, leadership, and advisory work. I’ve worked across consulting, travel, and large global operational businesses, and I’ve navigated the political complexity, tight budgets, ambitious expectations, and a technology landscape that changes faster than most organisations can absorb.
I set up Statistically Significant because I kept seeing the same problems. Organisations investing heavily in data and AI with no clear strategy. Leaders drowning in vendor noise. Well-intentioned initiatives that never connected back to business value. Good people who knew something needed to change but didn’t have a trusted sounding board.
I started out on the technical side as a business intelligence developer, then gradually moved closer to strategy, operating models, and executive decision-making. That background matters to how I work now: I understand the detail well enough to challenge it, but I’m equally focused on how data and AI support growth, efficiency, customer outcomes, and better decisions at leadership level.
In previous in-house leadership roles, I’ve led global data and analytics teams responsible for platforms, products, and advanced analytics capabilities. That included helping senior stakeholders make better use of data, building teams and ways of working that scale, and treating data as a product rather than a back-office function.
My work cuts across strategy, organisation, technology, and commercial thinking — because these things are inseparable in practice. A data strategy that doesn’t account for your org design will fail. A business case that can’t speak to finance will stall. A platform choice made without commercial context will cost you later.
I’ve also spent a lot of time contributing to the wider data community through industry events, speaking, and co-hosting a data podcast. That side of my work keeps me close to the real challenges leaders are facing across different sectors, and it reinforces something I believe strongly: most organisations don’t need more noise, they need clearer thinking.
I work with a small number of clients at any one time. That means real engagement, real thinking, and real accountability — not a junior team with a senior face on the pitch.
How I work
Every engagement starts with honest diagnosis. Before recommending anything, I spend time understanding the real problem — which is often not the one that was originally described. That means talking to the right people, reading between the lines of existing strategies, and separating the signal from the noise.
From there, I work closely and directly. You get access to me, not a team of consultants I’ve briefed. Work is practical, not theoretical — the outputs I produce are things you can actually use: strategies that can be presented to a board, business cases that finance will engage with, roadmaps that engineering can pick up.
I’m not trying to build a large consulting practice. I want to do a small number of things exceptionally well, for clients who value directness and results over process and polish.