Shaun Mc Girr

Responsible for shaping how Chelsea Football Club adopts and applies AI across the organisation. This role moves us from interest and experimentation to practical, responsible, value-creating use of AI, across operations, commercial activity, supporter experience, and internal ways of working.

Led DevOn’s transition toward an AI-first operating model across a 400-person software consultancy, shaping internal capability, delivery approach, and AI-enabled product thinking while also delivering customer projects. Customer projects and impact: - Sold, designed and co-delivered AI training programme for 300+ software professionals at Stedin, with >90% learner satisfaction, increased adoption of GitHub & MS Copilot, creating a follow-on “AI Moonshot” programme - Fractional AI Product Manager for Omniplan, a financial advice platform, providing architectural oversight and prototyping that helped them ship their first AI features in months (same role for SD Worx) - Kickstarted AI adoption at a major UK sporting body, first reducing use of unsafe/unsanctioned tools, then identifying and accelerating high-value use cases, and finally delivering a train-the-trainer programme; this turned AI from a source of fear and doubt to a competitive advantage - Trained product leadership at SD Worx in how to use AI in their own work and how to introduce it sensibly to their products, improving their ability to convert hackathon projects in to new features - Drove AI adoption across private equity firms and portfolio companies by identifying practical product and operational use cases with clear ROI: -- Helped CTO of a global fund administrator unblock its AI roadmap by aligning 55 senior leaders around a shared set of scalable, high-ROI use cases. -- Supported the CTO of a defence intelligence company in positioning AI as a strategic capability layer across existing ML-enabled products and operations, helping secure stronger Board-level engagement. -- Enabled firm-wide operational adoption of AI across an 80-person back-office function, surfacing and catalysing bottom-up use cases across tax, investor relations, legal, and HR. -- Accelerated and de-risked the launch of a portfolio company’s first AI product by shaping the architecture and clarifying the path to delivery.

Partnered with C-level and senior technical leaders across EMEA to define AI and data transformation strategies, align operating models, and accelerate enterprise AI platform adoption in complex organisations. Projects included: - For a European investment firm, worked with technical and business leadership to define an AI strategy tailored to their scale and resource. This involved workshops including the CEO, and produced a set of recommended initial use cases and people to train. Delivered as part of the Dataiku sales process, this work helped secure a deal in record time. - For 10+ global enterprises, I co-developed and delivered enablement sessions on Generative AI across summer 2023. This taught key customer decision-makers the basics and aligned Dataiku to GenAI. My sessions generated the majority of GenAI projects selected for co-building and showcasing on stage at Dataiku’s Everyday AI conference in Sep 2023. - Trained hundreds of Dataiku colleagues and partners on AI topics.

Recruited as the first Data Scientist in a newly formed Data Solutions group within Cox Automotive UK. Built and scaled data science capability from the ground up, contributed core algorithms to multiple production and in-development data products, and introduced predictive capabilities into existing decision-support tools. Recruited externally and developed internally three further data scientists, all of whom went on to leadership roles. Midway through my tenure I also took over a three-person BI team and became a direct advisor to the Board during COVID. Projects included: - As team leader and product owner, adapted a global used vehicle valuation methodology to the UK market, improving accuracy, reducing run and maintenance costs, and putting the right expert oversight around model outputs. This required close coordination across international product teams, local commercial teams, and technical stakeholders. - As an individual contributor, adapted big data processing methods from another product for use in the sales process, enabling arbitrary vehicle lists to be transformed to product spec, submitted to the production API, and turned into dashboards and collateral used in customer presentations. - As team leader and product owner, led a cross-functional redesign of the upsell process for a core customer segment, aligning sales, digital platform leads, and data scientists to improve data quality, simplify execution, and help sales teams focus on higher-value commercial conversations. - Led multiple negotiations of data and technology contracts with suppliers and customers, covering both the purchase and commercialisation of data.

Shaun joined the data science practice and was leading a client project within weeks. After successfully delivering that, he built and delivered training courses and was a consultant in a leading government data science team. Projects included: - End-to-end delivery of a predictive model helping a government agency optimise its debt collection activities. I was placed on this six-week project without having seen the data, nor having used the legacy technology (SAS EG). I needed to 1) understand the actual deliverable the client wanted, which changed multiple times, 2) discover, gather and process all the necessary data from multiple enterprise systems, 3) get help from many permanent team members, 4) work around system limitations to use the best algorithm for the task, and 5) deliver a working end-to-end project. - Developed a training course on agile requirements gathering for data warehouses, based on a 300-page book. My team was given the task of generating an accessible one-day training course from this content, for which I created an entire fake business called “Rick’s Pizza”. This business (complete with printed menus) evolved over time, forcing the course participants to adopt an agile mindset and continually adjust their technical design across the day. - Introduced agile ways of working to an already-leading government data science team, acting as scrum master while they learned to decouple individuals from entire pieces of work, reduce dependencies and increase velocity.

Working with Dr Jana von Stein (political scientist) on complex survival models in R to explain ratification of human rights treaties. This involved learning the underlying mechanics of a new statistical technique and working out how to apply it to the relevant data.

Worked on next-generation governance indicators with Dr Piero Stanig, culminating in an international workshop for Hertie's Governance Report.

Field research for dissertation, collecting data on bureaucratic corruption, in collaboration with Transparency International Russia. Sole-taught an elective undergraduate discussion seminar on recent research in political science.

Working on a dissertation about bureaucratic corruption, using data from Russian public procurement. Extensive statistics training and field research in Moscow. Taught myself to program in R before it was cool. Dissertation defended in September 2016.

Research Assistant for the Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy. Conducted research for Board project proposals on copyright in the digital era, and labor market effects of high-skilled immigration. Met with lobbyists and potential project supporters, discovered suitable academic resources.