As part of our careers and mentoring programme, we are excited to announce our next Business Lunch, on Thursday 12 March, 12:15-1:15pm. These panel-style events run once a term and are a maximum of 1 hour in the lecture theatre or online - designed to be consumed in your lunch hour. Open to the whole Shiplake community this session will focus on the rise of AI and how this is changing the world of work.

In-person attendees can enjoy a lunch on us while Headmaster, Mr Tyrone Howe, hosts a panel discussion in the lecture theatre. Our panellists include members of the Shiplake College community who all have experience with AI in the world of work. The discussion will explore what the world of work looks like with AI, what jobs will exist and what jobs will change and what opportunities there are to learn about AI and work with it in the future.

If you are unable to be there in person, the discussion will also be available via livestream. We hope this event will be particularly valuable to members of the Shiplake community working in/looking to develop their use of AI or those wishing to connect with like-minded professionals. 

To make sure we can provide enough lunches and share the livestream link, please let us know if you will be attending (in person or online) by clicking here.

We are excited to introduce you to our panellists:

Trevor Benstock

Trevor Benstock is the Founder of Campus-XR, an innovative educational platform leveraging VR and AI technologies to enhance education delivery and academic outcomes. Trevor is also Director of IT Services at The Bradfield Group and Technical Director serving on the board for Bradfield Technology Limited. 

Before joining Bradfield in 2012, Trevor was Technical Director at John Madejski Academy. Outside of his IT duties he provided support as a teacher of Science, Mathematics and Computing as well as running revision and sports clubs. During this time Trevor served on the Board of Governors and headed up the local schools IT advisory panel, providing commercial and technical consultancy services. 

Earlier in his career Trevor held the position of Technical Escalations Director at Verizon, working his way up from IP engineer to EMEA Tier Director within a 6-year period. Trevor holds a BSc (Hons) from Portsmouth University in Business Information Technology, alongside CCNP, Prince 2 and ITIL qualifications. 

Harry Powell

Harry Powell has been leading enterprise data science teams for 15 years. He is part of Endava's Data & AI Pod, thinking differently about AI to solve real world business problems and drive profits. 

Harry has two current areas of focus: designing and building multi-agent AI applications using the LangGraph platform and OpenAI LLMs; and graph-based data ML for modelling complex business processes. In particular Harry is a thought leader in a number of fundamental agentic AI fields such as ambiguity, consensus and stability. 

Harry built the first data science team at Barclays in London, releasing 12 ground-breaking applications to production, and sitting on the strategy board of Barclays Wealth. 

Harry then went on to build the data function at Jaguar Land Rover, delivering $200 million EBIT for 4 years in a row and laying the foundations for JLR's digital transformation. 

Before joining Endava, Harry was on the Executive Leadership team at TigerGraph, a Magic Quadrant Series-D graph database business, based in Redwood City, CA. 

Harry has degrees in Physics, Economics and Business. He spent the first 15 years of his career as an investment banker and private equity investor.

Liz Rumsey

Liz leads the development and execution of the overarching Vodafone Business UK product strategy in close collaboration with portfolio leads as part of our Product Leadership Team.  Her team oversees the product lifecycle from working with customers to develop innovation proofs of concept ahead of launching as standard products as well as managing the rationalisation of products through the stop sell communications through to end of life.    

Liz joined Vodafone in 2012 in the Commercial team supporting Vodafone’s multinational customers before moving into Group Product’s 5G and Cloud portfolio. During her time at Vodafone, Liz has mentored start-up founders through a partnership with Oxford University Innovation and chaired the Vodafone Group Women’s Network.  Prior to joining Vodafone, Liz held roles in Richard Branson’s Virgin group of companies after five years in UK Mergers and Acquisitions for both Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Cazenove.  Liz is an American citizen residing in the UK with her husband and teenage son. She holds a CIMA qualification from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and a BA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Zoe Crowder

Zoe Crowder is a Delivery Executive at Google Cloud with over 20 years of experience leading global technology transformations at Google, AWS, and Accenture. She currently specializes in bridging the gap between innovative AI concepts and real-world business delivery, turning AI use cases into reality for Google's customers.