2025 Agenda

Stephen established Beyond Education in 2019 as an initiative to help his peers struggling to secure job opportunities after graduation. Today Beyond Education is a talent and employer branding agency with an online community of over 120,000 followers, helping underrepresented talent access career opportunities with inclusive employers. Beyond Education has helped employers save £131,000 in recruitment related cost to date, reached over 16 million candidates online through content and has worked with organisations across various industries: LinkedIn, HSBC, BBC, Octopus Energy, BNY Mellon, St James Wealth Management, IQ-EQ, Federated Hermes, Octopus Investments, Octopus Money, 10,000 Black Interns Foundation, Wasserman, Uswitch, JumpStart Careers, CISI, EY Foundation, Samsung. Stephen graduated with first-class honours in Banking and Finance from the University of Northampton. Despite attending a ‘non-target’ university, he has worked in competitive industries such as FinTech, Consulting, Private Equity, and Asset Management before progressing into the CEO position at Beyond Education full-time. He is a passionate advocate for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, spearheading Beyond Education’s growth efforts through marketing, sales, and strategy development.

Shore Delano is a British-Nigerian cultural advocate and founder of The Rendition. Her heart lies in community building, serving the collective and making theatre accessible to all, especially Black communities. In 2019, drawing on over a decade of experience in production and project management within corporate and agency environments-and combining this with her expertise in connecting audiences to theatre shows at scale -Shore launched The Rendition.

Dr Abigail Otchere holds a BSc in biomedical science (Roehampton university), a MSc in neuroscience (Kings college London) and obtained her PhD in biomedical science from Aston University(2021). Currently she works as a medical writer at Excerpta Medica, a global medical communications agency under the Adelphi group. Abigail is also the co-founder of SiSTEM, an initiative which aims to connect and support women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) particularly black women and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Prior to her PhD, she worked in the clinical trials sector, mainly working on flu, asthma and virology studies and HIV/AIDs trials. Together with her sister (co-founder of SiSTEM) she dedicates her time to improving the retention and the uptake of black women in STEM by inspiring early years to working professionals and changing the narrative on STEM.

Currently an Infra Transformation Specialist at Accenture, helping organizations streamline operations and accelerate digital transformation. Recognized for her contributions to diversity in tech, she has previously spoken at the Black Tech Fest and was a finalist for the Inspirational Woman of the Year Award.

Starting as a software engineer, I have been building software across a number of industries over the last 15 years. I am part of the Telematics team at Samsara, building our connected operations platform. Prior to this, I was at AWS, where I was part of the MSK team.

Arsema is an experienced technical recruiter and the founder of her own independent python-specialist recruitment agency, hire|py. As an avid champion for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion across the tech industry, this passion then extended into the recruitment industry and so launched the Black Recruiters Network.The Black Recruiters Network was launched with the mission of championing black excellence within Recruitment & Talent Acquisition. At our core, we support our community members by providing a safe space aswell as championing careers within recruitment. We partner with recruitment agencies and internal talent teams to support with hiring efforts, reviewing hiring processes and ensuring that talent teams are inclusive. We also partner with underrepresented communities and host numerous career-related workshops to ensure that we are sharing our expertise to help black talent navigate hiring processes and excel in their careers.

I am a Lead Business Analyst with over 18 years of experience, qualified life coach and Master Practitioner of NLP. This winning combination allows me to build rapport with individuals at all levels, taking the time to find out what makes them tick, which achieves great results. I am an excellent team manager, coaching and developing people to be the best version of themselves. Outside of business analysis, I run workshops for women on empowerment, getting them out of their own way and showing how to be a trailblazer for themselves, their children and their peers.

Lee Rudolph is the VP of Platform Engineering, Quality & Productivity Engineering at Uber Technologies, overseeing global teams that deliver systems and processes to improve the reliability of Uber's offerings and enhance the productivity across Uber. He brings deep technical expertise and leadership in scaling complex technology platforms.

David is a technology leader, strategist and architect with over 35 years experience across a range of industries, including banking, insurance, transportation, utilities and media. Prior to joining the Central Digital and Data Office and then the Government Digital Service, David’s most recent roles have been as an Expert Partner at Boston Consulting Group, focusing on Cloud, DevOps and Digital Transformation, as a Digital Transformation Officer at Google, and as Chief Architect at HSBC. (And, a very long time ago, his first technology job was as a COBOL programmer in HM Customs & Excise!) David has designed, constructed and led many large transformation initiatives throughout his career, including the strategy and design for Lloyds Banking Group’s integration of Halifax Bank of Scotland and divestment of TSB, and for HSBC’s strategic move as the first major global financial institution to adopt public Cloud at scale. David believes passionately in the power of new technologies and new ways of working to liberate organisations from the constraints of their legacy technologies, and specialises in building teams, defining strategies and changing culture to achieve this goal. David holds a PhD in Philosophy, specialising in Ethics. In recent years, he has applied this expertise in the fields of AI and data ethics, helping HSBC define its first set of ethical principles for the use of AI and data, and working as part of the Responsible AI teams at HSBC, Google and BCG. Outside work, David kayaks regularly on the sea where he lives, attempts to keep on top of the latest developments in the field of technology ethics, and writes regularly on topics of technology, leadership and innovation in his weekly newsletter.

Colin Bannon is BT Business’ chief technology officer (CTO), charged with delivering its product technology strategy and designing solutions enabling strategic outcomes for more than one million businesses in the UK and 1,000 multinational enterprises in over 180 countries globally. BT’s customers include world-leading brands, government and financial services organisations, as well as domestic UK small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and public sector organisations, including defence and health. BT also provides wholesale products and services to other telecommunication companies in the UK and internationally. Colin is the architect of some of the largest customer network transformations in the world, including BT’s own enterprise network. In addition, he’s BT Business’ technology lead for partners including hyperscalers, networking equipment vendors and carrier neutral facility (CNF) providers. His latest project, Global Fabric, is BT’s new, transformative network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform. This is a full re-platforming and digitisation of BT’s entire global network footprint, services and partner integrations for business customers. The industry-disrupting concept was incubated in the CTO team under Colin and is one of the biggest programmes BT has pursued. Global Fabric, a fully digitalised, automated, API-first platform, will offer customers near-instant control to set up, change and scale connectivity services, including Internet, MPLS, Ethernet, Cloud interconnectivity, DC Interconnect, mobile Interconnect, data sovereignty, DDoS, edge compute that supports service insertion such as SD-WAN and SASE, SSE, SIP, load balancing, and firewalls. Colin is active across the telecommunications industry and academia, holding a seat on the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) and lecturing at Warwick University. In addition to his 20 years at BT Group, including roles such as chief architect, Colin has held engineering leadership and consulting engineer positions at IBM, Lucent INS and Unisys.

Izzy Obeng MBE is a British entrepreneur, leadership coach, and influential voice on inclusive innovation. She is the Founder and CEO of Foundervine, recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe’s leading startup accelerators for underrepresented founders. Izzy advises Lloyds Banking Group and serves on the Investment Committee of the Growth Impact Fund, a £10m vehicle backing mission-driven ventures. She is a Trustee of Mission 44, the charity founded by Sir Lewis Hamilton, and an active angel investor—investing on behalf of Ada Ventures and Zeal Capital Partners to champion diverse founders across the UK, US, and Africa. Her work has been featured in The Times, BBC, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social Impact (2022), awarded the Freedom of the City of London (2024), and received an MBE in 2025 for her services to digital growth and inclusive entrepreneurship.

Abi Mohamed leads Community at Diversity VC, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to setting a global benchmark for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the venture capital industry. With over seven years of experience in startups and venture capital, Abi has supported scaling founders, worked in investing, and led initiatives aimed at building a fairer and more inclusive world.

In 2022 DJ AG walked away from his 9 to 5 to follow a deeper purpose—using music and real conversations to connect with people. Starting with livestreams from home he quickly took his decks to the streets sharing joy face to face with the public. Known for his ability to engage with anyone regardless of background DJ AG blends music with genuine dialogue. Whether speaking to someone facing homelessness or addiction or giving out food and support on camera his approach is rooted in empathy and connection. A standout moment came when Daddy Freddy once the world’s fastest rapper appeared in one of DJ AG’s videos. It went viral with over 3 million views introducing a legend to a new audience and showing DJ AG’s power to bring people together through music and conversation. His platform has grown fast. DJ AG now has over 1.4 million followers on TikTok with more than 100,000 people regularly tuning into his livestreams. His Instagram has reached 585,000 followers and continues to grow. He’s caught the attention of global names including Will Smith Ed Sheeran JME Skepta and even Naomi Campbell. For DJ AG it’s never been about fame. It’s about connection visibility and impact.