Martin Lewis Knowles Building AI‑Ready Leaders & Succession Intelligence

My career in talent and learning began in 1997 at PCS (now DSGi), where I built and led a pan-European award-winning learning team across a workforce of 5,000 — spanning IT engineers, distribution, logistics and service functions. It was here I learned that great learning has to connect to work, not just to content.

From there, consulting roles at Capital One, Linklaters and Carphone Warehouse sharpened my ability to work across complex, expert-driven organisations — designing career pathways, succession frameworks and leadership development programmes that had to earn their place at the commercial table.

At Veolia Energy UK, I pioneered strengths-based talent identification for over 500 senior leaders — work that the CEO directly attributed to an 8% improvement in EBITDA, equivalent to approximately £33m. I was subsequently selected for the Executive Development Programme, taking on Account Director-level rotations on major contracts including Rolls-Royce, Diageo, Severn Trent Water and Lloyds Banking Group.

In 2011, I founded SLS Ltd, a boutique talent consulting practice delivering talent strategy, succession planning, leadership development and organisational effectiveness to mid-sized European enterprises. Over six years, I designed competency models, job families and skills-based frameworks, led coaching programmes for leadership teams, and developed talent system integrations — including mobile application development — for a range of clients across sectors.

In 2015, I moved into what became the most significant chapter of my career: a consulting engagement with Gamesys that evolved into nearly a decade as Head of Learning & Executive Director Talent CoE — first at Gamesys, then at Bally’s following acquisition. I built a global, award-winning talent function from the ground up: designing academies, talent analytics platforms, succession pipelines, DEI communities, performance frameworks and AI-powered workforce intelligence across 30 countries.

Throughout all of it — the highlights and the harder moments — what has shaped my practice most is a conviction that people are the strategy, not the support function. When organisations treat talent as a commercial priority and invest in the conditions where people thrive, the results flow.