Two distinct clients.
One exceptional team.
We work with two groups deliberately. Our depth is genuine — not replicated across every vertical.
AI Startups & Scale-Ups
You understand the technology. What you need is a team that has been here before — who can help you navigate investment, sharpen your commercial model, and stand in front of a board with credibility. We plug directly into your management team.
Enterprise & Corporate
You are not short of enthusiasm for AI. What you are short of is a clear-headed answer to where it creates real value in your business — especially in energy and retail. We bring academic rigour and practical implementation insight to cut through the noise.
Three things differentiate Ballista.
Research at the frontier
Our AI Partner Dr Lu Xing is an active Associate Professor with 70+ published papers in AI and energy systems. When Ballista advises on AI, it is grounded in live research — not a reading list.
Built for delivery
Between us, we have founded and exited multiple technology companies, led technology through major corporate transactions, and operated at board level in high-growth environments. We are operators who consult.
Sector conviction
Our deepest expertise is in energy — decarbonisation, smart grids, and hydrogen — and technology-enabled retail and marketplace businesses. We go deep rather than wide.
Designed around your actual challenge.
AI Strategy & Advisory
Helping enterprises and growth-stage companies define, test, and scale their AI strategy — grounded in commercial reality, not vendor promises.
Learn more →CTO-on-Demand
A fully-supported Chief Technology Officer service for non-technical founders, backed by AI tools and our team's combined technical depth.
Learn more →AI Productisation & Scaling
Taking proven AI pilots from proof-of-concept to a hardened, multi-tenant product that scales — platform architecture, deployment, reliability, and the product craft that makes AI dependable in production.
Learn more →AI & Energy Systems
Research-grade direction on applied AI in energy: model and uncertainty strategy, smart grids, storage, and the flexibility frontier — grounded in live academic research, not a reading list.
Learn more →Research-to-Market & Commercialisation
Bridging the gap from IP and research to commercial product — investor narrative, proof-of-value design, pricing, and go-to-market for technology businesses preparing to scale.
Learn more →Fractional & Interim Leadership
CEO, CTO, COO, NED — experienced, embedded executive support for the period and scope you need. We become part of your team.
Learn more →Small, deliberate, credentialled.
Every partner brings specific, verifiable depth — and collectively we cover a range most advisory firms cannot match.
Piers Corfield
Piers is a serial entrepreneur, technology executive, and corporate strategist with twelve years in the energy industry. He has founded more than six investment-backed companies — across wireless communications, electronic document management, mobile communications, and industrial digitalisation — served as commercial CTO in three organisations, and delivered three successful exits.
Dr Lu Xing
Lu is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University and a Chartered Engineer, with a career dedicated to the role of AI in energy. She leads cross-disciplinary research on AI in energy systems and materials — spanning smart grids, energy storage, hydrogen, and batteries — with grid infrastructure and flexibility a particular area of expertise.
Anthony Smith
Anthony is a senior technology leader and platform-builder whose rare span runs from creative and product design through to applied AI and engineering — owning the full arc from product vision to scaled, in-production platforms. He has built and led the engineering and product teams behind high-stakes commercial platforms, with an exacting command of user experience: turning complex, fast-moving data into interfaces users trust and act on with confidence.
From the frontier.
The AI opportunity for SMEs looks nothing like the enterprise version
For a UK SME, the AI opportunity looks almost nothing like it does for a large enterprise — different constraints, shorter decision cycles, and transformative upside. A distillation of what actually works in practice, and what reliably fails.
The pilot-to-production gap: why most industrial AI never scales
Proving a model works is a different discipline from turning it into a product that scales across many customers. The work that closes that gap is unglamorous, and it is exactly where most ventures stall.
Accuracy is not enough: why uncertainty is the metric that matters in industrial AI
In trust-sensitive, low-data industries, a model that knows when it might be wrong is worth more than a more accurate model that does not. Uncertainty-aware, physics-informed AI is how forecasts earn the right to drive real decisions.
Ready for a different kind of conversation about AI?
Whether you need strategic counsel, hands-on technical leadership, or help taking an AI product to scale, we welcome the opportunity to understand your situation.
Talk to us