Robin Hutchinson

I graduated from McMaster University in 1988 and headed to the University of Texas at Austin to study artificial intelligence - long before AI became the force it is today. Austin was also where I pursued my other passion: I competed as a professional triathlete, balancing elite competition with graduate coursework. That dual discipline of physical endurance and intellectual rigour shaped how I approach challenges to this day.

I returned to Toronto to join Border Network Technologies, where we were building firewall technologies at the dawn of enterprise internet security. We were acquired by Secure Computing of Roseville, Minnesota, for $190 million in July 1996. At Secure Computing, I assumed responsibility for all products - both commercial and government security technologies. It was my first experience taking innovative technology through a major acquisition and scaling it within a larger organisation.

I moved back to Toronto to take on the role of President at ASG Technologies, where we developed semiconductor technologies for manufacturing better chips. That company was also acquired, reinforcing a pattern that would define my career: build something valuable, scale it, and find the right commercial pathway.

In 1997, I joined EY as a Senior Manager in Cleveland, Ohio - then their Americas centre. I was responsible for building out the eCommerce practice and eventually became leader of the Security practice. I made partner in 1997, the same year I joined, and through those early years ran multiple risk and consulting-based businesses globally.

In 1999, I was asked to lead a significant investment: eSecurityOnline, a wholly owned subsidiary of EY based in Kansas City. As CEO, I held full P&L responsibility. We invented asset-tracking and security software products that served most of the major banks in the US, Canada, and the UK. In 2003, we sold the company in an all-cash deal to Computer Associates - my second successful exit.

After the eSecurityOnline sale, I returned to Toronto to lead EY's Canadian consulting practice. We achieved market-leading growth across all of the Americas. I served as Global Coordinating Service Partner for several NYSE-listed clients, building relationships that grew into accounts generating over $100 million in annual revenue for the firm - sustained at that level for four to six consecutive years.

I moved to London as deputy to the head of AABS (Assurance and Advisory Business Services). Among other responsibilities, I led the separation of the Assurance/Audit business from Advisory - which eventually became known as Consulting. I also oversaw the build-out of Global Delivery Services (GDS) in India, Argentina, and Poland - our offshoring unit that now comprises over 60,000 people.

I spent considerable time in India developing the legal structure and business model we still operate under today, creating strategic advantage through incentives that encourage all countries to use the capacity and talent equitably.

I later became deputy of the consulting practice, where we further developed our risk business and rebuilt a full-fledged management and technology consulting capability - years after being precluded from doing so following the sale of our original consulting practice to Capgemini. Coupling my knowledge of GDS with consulting, we established substantial presence in India while leveraging Poland and Argentina for different skill sets and time zone advantages.

The firm's strategy was to become even more global. I was sent to New York for eighteen months as Markets Implementation Leader, sitting on the Americas Operating Committee to steer growth, investments, and strategic direction. My role was to make offerings across all service lines more uniform and synergistic to support global expansion.

I returned to the UK in 2011 as COO for Global Markets, continuing the work I had done in the Americas but now on a global scale. I again assumed leadership of GDS expansion and worked on new market offerings, including the build-out of technology consulting capabilities across the firm.

My background as a competitive triathlete led to work in professional sport. I partnered with Velon, which held the sports marketing rights for 18 of the top professional cycling teams - the teams that race the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and Vuelta a España. We built real-time telemetry systems that captured heart rate, power output, and GPS positioning from sensors on each rider's bike, transmitted the data mid-race to our analytics platform, and delivered live IoT tracking to fans, team managers, and broadcast partners including Eurosport. It was one of the earlier examples of turning raw athlete data into a live fan engagement product.

In 2020, I moved into my final senior leadership role at EY, with Client Technology, which develops all products, platforms, and AI across the firm for all service lines. Every service line technology officer reported into my organisation. I worked daily with our ten regional CTOs to align go-to-market strategy. P&L responsibility exceeded $2 billion.

A large part of the role was making AI commercially accountable. I designed the firm's model for allocating AI and model consumption back to each business by engagement code, with agent certification and clear guidance on matching model choice to task - replacing the costly default of running frontier models on every workload.

I also oversaw the entire technical side of the Everest transaction - what would have been a $100 billion deal to divide EY into AssureCo (Assurance) and NewCo (Consulting and Tax). We were deep into the transaction: new Azure tenants created, substantial legal entity work for separation completed, and determinations made on how to split 4,000 applications. Client Technology and our team led most of the critical aspects of the deal, given how the valuation was calculated. Although the deal was ultimately scrapped in April 2023 after sixteen months of intensive work, the transaction gave us a strategic imperative to transform many parts of our business. We took on that new trajectory and had accomplished much of that organisational transformation by the time I retired.

Beyond commercialisation, I was responsible for inventing many of the technologies the firm uses today:

I retired from the EY global partnership in June 2026. I now build and commercialise six AI software products through ByZyB.ai - spanning applied language learning, writing integrity, design-system generation, and multi-jurisdiction regulatory compliance - and advise boards and executive teams on what is worth pursuing in AI and what is not.

I am available for non-executive director and board committee roles. Based between London and Toronto, with governance experience spanning the UK, Canada, the US, and markets worldwide across ten super-regions.