Marcus Bearden

Most enterprise AI stalls at the pilot for two reasons: the work isn’t tied to what matters to the organisation, and the governance around it was built to stop things changing. I lead Gartner Consulting’s AI capability across EMEA, and unsticking exactly that is most of my week.

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At Gartner Consulting I lead our AI solutions business across EMEA. Half my week is business development: working with senior clients and account teams to sharpen the problem and turn early interest into well-defined engagements. The other half is delivery, and I stay hands-on, working with small teams of three to eight people, building the core answer myself when it matters and presenting it to the client directly. Across the wider EMEA AI portfolio, I turn what works on one engagement into reusable offerings, shape who we hire and run the enablement that gets our teams and clients to value faster.

Recent engagements:

• An execution framework and operating model that moved a global power technology manufacturer from experimentation into governed, scalable delivery, with AI use cases now in production.
• An agentic AI strategy and delivery framework that shaped how a UK public sector body built its first agentic workloads.

I started as a developer and I still build. AI agents I’ve built are in production at Gartner, helping consultants answer clients faster, and I lead a community of AI builders. Outside work, I build my own tools.

I’ve run the thing as well as advised on it:

• At Slalom I built the UK&I cloud and emerging technology capability, sponsored the AWS partnership that earned us AWS SI Partner of the Year for UK&I in 2023, and grew our UK&I and EMEA cloud and emerging tech business from about £1M to about £15M.
• At 2nd Watch I hired 90 people, scaled the cloud solutions organisation from 24 to about 115, and grew a global beverage company account from about $3,000 a month to more than $15M a year in revenue.
• Before that I spent four and a half years as a CTO.

I’m American, originally from Atlanta, Georgia. I moved to London in 2021 with no network, built a career here and went from Senior Director to Partner in three years. I’m grateful for the community I’ve found on this side of the pond. I think in systems, and I run the same frameworks over my own career that I run over a client’s organisation.

Away from the desk, I like the things that can’t be rushed. Wine, which I collect and study (WSET Level 3) mostly as an excuse to keep exploring. Bonsai, which teach patience to someone who never had much. A 1963 Chevy pickup my dad and I are bringing back to life one weekend at a time, with Formula 1 and motorcycles for when the pace needs to go the other way. And diving: I’m rescue certified and I’ll get in the water anywhere, partly for what’s down there and partly because Teams doesn’t work underwater. Over 45 countries so far. The list isn’t finished.