Hill News February 2026 - Update from our MD, Dr Jonno Hill

In our business currently, like in so many others, fast-evolving AI technologies are providing an opportunity to automate cognitive tasks and create improved efficiencies.  This is having a particular impact in our software development teams, where new tools (I can’t say ‘the latest tools’ because of how much evolution there has been in this space over even just the last 6 months!) are enabling our developers to become much more productive.  The rapid evolution is tricky to manage for Dan, our CIO, and his teams, but this is clearly going to be how software is developed into the future, and so we are working hard to keep up in this rapidly-developing space. 

While there is understandable concern among IT professionals at the potential for job loss, our approach is to hold onto our headcount, and to increase the outputs substantially.  There is much new software that we would like in our business, and that our customers would like to see us delivering for our various digital customer interfaces, so it is exciting to see the rate of progress pick up so much. 

There are other parts of our business where AI tools will enable us to automate much of the cognitive tasks that are currently performed by our people.  Our business, like so many others, therefore faces an exciting opportunity to transform elements of our operations over time.  I don’t want to downplay the threat that many will feel at the potential for their jobs to be at risk, but in our case, and I’d like to believe for most businesses, the outcome will not be a wave of redundancies, but rather an unleashing of creative potential as our experienced people are liberated from the more routine aspects of their jobs to spend more time on innovative and improvement-focused activity. 

Given the high-compliance environment we operate in, and the duty of care we feel toward our customers and the decisions they make based on our results, we will take a careful approach to implementing new AI tools and agents in our core operations.  However, it would be naive to think there won’t be substantial changes in our industry over time, and we look forward to being at the front of the pack in the way that we adopt these exciting new technologies.