Turning operational complexity into landed opportunity.
Newforge Advisory Partners helps technology and professional-services organisations own their AI — bringing strategy, evaluation, and capability back in-house, and turning ambition into transformation that lands.
Senior counsel built on how large technology organisations actually operate.
Locate the pain
Most transformation stalls because the real friction sits below the org chart. We start where the budget, the bottleneck, and the decision-maker meet.
Shape the work
An opportunity is only as good as its framing. We translate ambiguous mandates into scoped, fundable engagements that stakeholders can say yes to.
Land it
Strategy without execution is a deck. We stay embedded through the messy middle until the work is sold, staffed, and moving.
Where Newforge works.
AI & Platform Strategy
Helping organisations move from AI ambition to a sequenced, defensible roadmap they own — built to bring core capability back in-house rather than rent it indefinitely from a sprawl of vendors, and grounded in what the underlying platforms and teams can realistically deliver.
Typically: a bold AI mandate, capability scattered across vendors, and a roadmap that overpromises.
Go-to-Market Advisory
Working alongside consulting and technology firms to build credible pipelines into large enterprise accounts, with a clear read on where value and budget actually sit.
Typically: a strong offer that keeps stalling out, and no clear read on who actually signs.
Operational Redesign
Untangling the processes, ownership, and incentives that quietly throttle execution at scale — and rebuilding them to move.
Typically: capable teams, sound strategy, and execution that mysteriously crawls.
A small number of engagements, chosen for fit.
Advising a global strategy practice on enterprise AI opportunity design
Helping a professional-services firm sharpen how it diagnoses and frames AI transformation opportunities — bringing clarity to where value, authority, and budget actually sit inside complex enterprise accounts.
Designing a global AI evaluation framework at enterprise scale
Built the strategy and engineering approach for evaluating AI capability across a large, complex vendor and operations landscape inside a leading technology company — delivering measurable, durable annualised impact.
Restructuring budget governance and demand forecasting within a platform function
Shaping operational-redesign work around budget management and forecasting inside a major technology organisation — locating where value and decision-making authority actually sit.
Client names withheld by agreement. Engagement details available under NDA where appropriate.
Big organisations rarely have a strategy problem. They have an execution problem dressed up as one.
Most leadership teams already know roughly where they need to go. What stalls them is the friction beneath the org chart — the accountability gaps, the misaligned incentives, the budget that lives one function away from the decision that needs it.
AI raises the stakes — and adds a new one: ownership. Too many organisations have rented their AI capability out to a sprawl of vendors and consultancies, and quietly lost the roadmap, the evaluation, and the spend. The ones that compound an advantage bring the core back in-house and actually own it. Newforge exists to help them tell the difference — and to stay until it's done.
Stephen
Founder & Principal, Newforge Advisory Partners
Stephen is a senior AI strategy and engineering executive whose career sits at the intersection of AI transformation, operational redesign, and large-scale execution. At Google, he led AI & engineering strategy — designing a global AI evaluation framework that delivered eight-figure annualised impact across a large, complex vendor and operations landscape.
Earlier he was Trust & Safety Technology Practice Lead at Accenture, and built the TMT Engineering Services practice at Deloitte. At the start of his career he founded and exited two ventures — wheretotonight.com, acquired in 2003, and NI Print Ltd.
He serves as a Board Director of Friends of Young Enterprise Northern Ireland and as an Executive Advisor to PhishCloud Inc. He holds an MSc in Information Management & Computer Science from Queen's University Belfast, and is based in Oakland, California.
- AI & engineering strategy
- Accenture
- Trust & Safety Technology Practice Lead
- Deloitte
- Built the TMT Engineering Services practice
- Ventures
- Founded & exited wheretotonight.com (2003) and NI Print Ltd
- Boards & advisory
- Board Director, Friends of Young Enterprise NI · Executive Advisor, PhishCloud
- Education
- MSc, Queen's University Belfast
Let's talk.
Newforge works with a small number of clients at a time on senior, independent counsel. If you're shaping something that needs a clear outside read, start a conversation.