Before he asked machines to interpret people, Jonathan Lakin studied how people interpret marks on a page. His degree was in typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading. It is an unexpectedly apt beginning for a career in customer intelligence. A letter gets its meaning from the letters around it. A customer action poses a similar problem: what, exactly, does this mean here?
Lakin co-founded Intent HQ in 2010. Sixteen years later, the company works with enterprises on understanding customer behaviour and deciding when to respond. His recurring interest is the person concealed by a category. Marketing has plenty of categories. People have a regrettable habit of wandering out of them.
Learning to read the gaps
The route between typography and AI took Lakin through several kinds of business. His career has included loyalty agency Blacksun, analytics business WhiteLight Systems, Global Workplace, recruitment technology company eTalentworks and Rights Marketing, which worked in media and web entertainment formats. These are different commercial settings, with a shared practical concern: how to make information useful to somebody.
He also completed IESE Business School’s Global Executive MBA, graduating with the class of 2003. In his account of his career, design sits alongside cognitive computing and evidence-based decisions. He describes learning to combine intuition with evidence, and recognising that other people may have better answers. It is a sensible admission for a chief executive; the difficult part is remembering it during a meeting.
His educational background makes the later work easier to understand without supplying a tidy origin myth. Typography demands attention to the relationship between a message and its reader. Customer intelligence asks what a business can reasonably understand about a person from the evidence available. Both leave room for misunderstanding, however immaculate the presentation.
The campaign brief meets the actual customer
Lakin has a useful example of the trouble with customer categories. Discussing personalisation in 2021 with Cartesian’s Scott Appleton, he described campaigns aimed at people aged over 55 whose actual buyers were millennials. The imagined customer had made it into the brief. The purchasing customer had apparently neglected to read it.
The lesson he drew was practical: understanding who responds could allow a business to send fewer emails while remaining relevant. He also pointed to differences in the language customers recognise and in the payment methods they value. The question extended beyond selecting an audience to the experience that followed.
“Customers are tired of the noise of mass marketing.”
Jonathan Lakin, 2021
A year earlier, he had challenged the habit of averaging customer interactions. An average can reduce storage and simplify analysis while erasing the peculiarities that make an offer useful. His proposed alternative required preserving meaning in behavioural data, then making that understanding available across a company’s systems. The awkward customer, in other words, deserved to survive the spreadsheet.
That concern still appears in his writing. In March 2026, Lakin examined the difference between someone expressing an interest and someone preparing to act. A repeated return, a comparison and a change in the pace of activity can matter more than a single visit. His argument depends on sequences and context. A click on its own has a limited vocabulary.
One action rarely tells the whole story.
Keeping the intelligence close
The desire to understand somebody creates an immediate responsibility towards them. Lakin’s public work treats privacy as a product design question. One part of his approach is to move the interpretation of behaviour onto the device where it occurs.
In his account of Edge AI, general campaign logic can remain in the cloud while the device decides which message fits the current context. Personal data can stay on the handset. The architecture changes where the decision happens, a detail that matters even when the customer sees only the resulting offer.
He has also described Intent HQ’s Privacy Twins: transformed representations of behavioural patterns intended to preserve useful statistical information while protecting identity. The aim is to let intelligence travel without passing around the original personal record. These are the company’s design claims, with a specific commercial purpose in regulated environments where moving customer data creates obstacles.
What makes the subject revealing about Lakin is the attention he gives to the plumbing. A promise about discretion is easy to print. Deciding where data lives, how it is transformed and who can use the result requires choices that reach into the product. For a founder selling customer understanding, those choices help define the relationship being offered.
The company around the algorithm
Lakin’s June 2025 conversation with UKAI chief executive Tim Flagg covered behavioural AI, empathy, on-device processing and the possibility that emerging markets could move quickly in adoption. It also addressed a less glamorous problem: getting enterprises beyond separate use cases and towards changes that connect the business.
The difficulty is recognisable to anyone who has watched a promising idea become a chain of handoffs. An insight belongs to one team. Preparing a campaign belongs to another. Approval arrives on a different timetable. A customer has little reason to wait for this administrative relay to finish.
Lakin returned to that problem in his March 2026 writing about enterprise interfaces and workflows. His argument was that an organisation can possess useful intelligence and still be too slow to use it. Making the underlying complexity accessible to business users becomes part of the engineering assignment. A marketing manager needs to make a decision without first acquiring an informal degree in the company’s infrastructure.
Telecommunications has been an important proving ground. Lakin’s writing about operating at telco scale describes the demands of continuous production: changing data, tight response times and the consequences of failure. A demonstration can finish when the presentation ends. A service handling customer intelligence has to keep working while customers, networks and commercial priorities change around it.
That setting helps explain the emphasis on implementation throughout his public work. Serving a large operator means fitting into an organisation with established systems and responsibilities. A founder can have a persuasive view of the future and still spend a considerable part of the present helping a client make its next decision.
Data quality adds another obstacle. His description of Deep Signal, Intent HQ’s data-processing layer, pays attention to inconsistent identifiers, duplicate events and information arriving from disconnected systems. The appeal of a prediction depends on the material beneath it. Three records of one customer can make a system look impressively busy while leaving it badly confused.
Intent HQ launched IntentOne on 21 May 2026. The platform brings customer signals together and presents opportunities for teams and their existing systems to act on. Its design includes evidence trails for recommended actions and visibility for compliance and risk functions. The product puts Lakin’s concern with timing into a concrete enterprise proposition: understanding must arrive in a usable form.
- IESE Global Executive MBA graduating class
- Intent HQ established
- Seed Group partnership announced
- IntentOne launches on 21 May
A network with people in it
For someone whose business concerns patterns in data, Lakin also talks about relationships in ordinary human terms. In an IESE alumni spotlight featured in February 2026, he described the school’s community as support through career changes and the challenges of building a startup. The connection had continued well beyond receiving the qualification.
Intent HQ’s support for IESE also took an institutional form. A gift recorded in the school’s 2019-2020 donor report helped establish its Chair on Changing Consumer Behavior, held by marketing professor José Luis Nueno. It connected a company working with customer data to academic work on how consumption changes.
In a public reflection on 2025, Lakin put particular emphasis on the people around him. He credited colleagues who challenged and inspired him and made the business better. There is an instructive resemblance between that account of leadership and his objection to customer averages: in both cases, the differences between people are doing useful work.
Partnerships have also shaped the company’s expansion. In January 2025, Intent HQ announced an alliance with Seed Group to support entry into Dubai and the wider Middle East and North Africa. The arrangement paired its technology with local relationships and market knowledge. International growth, in this instance, involved knowing people as well as understanding patterns.
Sixteen years, and the same question
By October 2026, the business was entering another commercial phase. Gareth Evans, who joined on 1 September, was announced as chief revenue officer, with responsibility for global commercial operations and taking IntentOne to more businesses, including the mid-market. Lakin described the company’s priorities in terms of understanding people and making that understanding useful to enterprises and AI agents.
“Models are becoming a commodity. Human context isn’t.”
Jonathan Lakin, October 2026
On 8 October, IntentOne received AI Solution of the Year at the AI World Series Awards in Dubai. Intent HQ’s announcement also reported more than 325 million customer profiles supported and 250 billion events processed daily. Those are company-reported operating figures. They give a sense of the distance between Lakin’s concern with individual differences and the industrial machinery needed to handle them.
The typography student now runs a business that tries to read behaviour across enormous volumes of activity. The underlying problem remains wonderfully inconvenient. People change their minds. Context changes a meaning. A well-timed suggestion can be welcome; the same suggestion later can be clutter. After sixteen years, Lakin is still building around that narrow, consequential interval between a business noticing something and a person finding it useful.