
FourNet began with four founders and one customer. Twenty-one years later, Richard Pennington is steering a business of around £65 million towards AI, with the same awkward question at its heart: who takes responsibility when the technology has to work?

He helped build PCI Pal around a simple proposition: a payment can succeed without a call centre seeing your card details. A move to Charlotte, a network of partners and the arrival of conversational AI have given that idea a much larger stage.

An obsolete prototype sits behind an unusually useful lesson. For Content Guru co-founder Martin Taylor, three decades in communications have meant knowing when to build, when to change direction and when to stop.