From Pension Pot to Public Sector Transformation: Martin Neale on the Futurise Podcast

Our CEO Martin Neale recently joined fellow Computing AI Leadership Index 2026 honouree Rob for a podcast conversation about ICS.AI's journey, the realities of deploying AI at scale in the public sector, and why the next wave of change could be even bigger than ChatGPT.

When Martin Neale cashed in his pension at 55 to start an AI company focused on the UK public sector, it was - by any measure - a bold bet. Nine years on, ICS.AI is growing at 100% per annum, has helped Derby City Council bank £12 million in verified savings, and is now offering councils a guaranteed £5–10 million return on their AI transformation programmes.

In a candid podcast discussion, Martin shared the story behind the company, what's really working on the ground, and where things are heading next.

Born in AI, Built for Public Services

ICS.AI wasn't a consultancy that pivoted into AI. It was, as Martin put it, "set up to be 100% AI born in AI" - with the public sector at its heart from day one.

"If you're going to change the world with AI, why not start with the people whose mission is to help others?" he explained. The logic was straightforward: public sector organisations communicate at population scale, they face common challenges, and there's enormous repeatability across the services they deliver.

The early years were spent exploring what AI could do for councils, universities, and health bodies. The area that moved fastest was conversational AI - the ability to reduce costs and improve the quality of communication with residents, students, and service users.

Then ChatGPT arrived.

"I didn't expect to see a ChatGPT in my professional career, probably in my life," Martin admitted. "And then all of a sudden the little monster appeared, and we were a four-year-old AI company at that point. We knew exactly what it was and what it meant."

ICS.AI pivoted completely, rebuilding around generative AI. Today, the company's mission is firmly centred on organisational transformation - delivering specific, bankable outcomes for public sector bodies under ever-increasing pressure.

The Derby City Council Story: £12 Million in Real Savings

The flagship example is Derby City Council, which began working with ICS.AI in 2023. Over a 15-month period, the council saved £12 million - verified savings that have been subject to Freedom of Information requests detailing precisely how they were achieved.

"These aren't theoretical savings," Martin emphasised. "They literally would have gone bust had they not saved that money. It was as simple as that."

The scale of the programme was significant. ICS.AI identified 260 different AI use cases across the council and agreed with Derby to target 54 of them, running across nine simultaneous programmes of work. Half of what was ultimately delivered wasn't even in the original specification - it emerged during the project as the technology evolved.

"You know, we have to be agile," Martin said. "We spend an awful lot on R&D, a lot of time and effort on making sure that we are at the forefront of understanding what the new capabilities are."

Busting Two Persistent Myths

The conversation turned to two ideas that Martin hears constantly in the market - and pushes back on firmly.

Myth 1: Start with mundane, repeatable processes.

The widely held advice is to begin your AI journey with low-risk, routine tasks. Martin disagrees.

"We sort of fundamentally rebel against that. That notion is very much the industry norm - find a thing, get it successful, grow from there. And I think that's perpetuated by vendors who just have a thing to sell."

His argument is that point solutions don't drive organisational change. When a council needs to take £15 million out of its cost base in 12 months, a single use case won't get you there. It requires an ambitious, multi-workstream transformation programme with a unified technology platform underneath it.

Myth 2: Get your data right before you start.

"That's the classic, isn't it?" Martin said with a laugh. "And probably, no. We've done huge projects in lots of different organisations who have exactly the same mess of data that everybody has. A mess of data is the norm - it's not an exception."

Rather than treating imperfect data as a blocker, ICS.AI uses AI itself to solve data problems - deploying agents to crawl systems, find duplicates, and identify the most recent records.

The company's position is clear: while data-centric projects may need clean data from the outset, many of the highest-value use cases do not.

Adoption: Surprisingly Good

One of the most encouraging parts of the conversation was about adoption. In a sector where people might be expected to fear automation, the reality has been strikingly positive.

"It's been surprisingly good. We've all been very surprised by how good it's been," Martin said. "I think a lot of that is driven by the fact that just working with AI is actually pretty positive. Most technology you're kind of forced to use and it's disappointing and difficult."

At Derby, 25% of the council's 4,000-strong workforce are already regularly using ICS.AI's tools - and not all of them have been through formal training yet. The company is on target for a minimum 50% adoption rate across the enterprise.

On the resident-facing side, Martin encouraged listeners to try it for themselves: "Ring Derby City Council's main number and have a play with it. I hear great stories about people trying to catch it out - and it does really well."

He also shared a telling anecdote about attending an awards dinner where he met a Derby employee from a completely different department. Unprompted, the man described at length how transformative AI had been for his work - and it turned out he was using ICS.AI's platform without knowing Martin was behind it.

"That's the kind of passion you get in people. It does make a big difference."

Why ICS.AI Can Offer a £5–10 Million Savings Guarantee

Perhaps the most striking claim in the conversation was ICS.AI's savings guarantee to customers: £5 million for a standard transformation, rising to £10 million for councils going through Local Government Reorganisation (LGR).

"Consultancy companies don't do this and technology companies don't do this - because they can't," Martin explained. "They're two halves of a problem. We are a technology and consultancy company combined."

Because ICS.AI owns the platform, knows the deflection rates, understands the use rates, and has the calculators to model the outcomes, the company can underwrite those numbers with confidence.

"What we're fundamentally selling here is outcomes. Customers don't care whether it's our copilot or Microsoft's copilot, our AI at the front door or Google's AI at the front door. What they care about is that they're getting a specific outcome."

What Comes Next: Three Stages of Transformation

Looking ahead, Martin outlined a three-stage model for AI transformation that he sees as the long-term roadmap:

Stage 1 - AI for All. Getting AI into everyone's hands - citizens, residents, and employees - quickly and at scale. Every member of staff gets access. No one is left behind.

Stage 2 - Connected Estates. Ensuring that an organisation's internal platforms can work seamlessly together within agentic workflows, and that existing applications are resilient against emerging AI-driven security threats.

Stage 3 - Autonomy. Once the first two stages are in place, organisations are realistically positioned to achieve end-to-end autonomy in whatever way is appropriate for their context.

Martin also flagged a major shift he believes is as significant as ChatGPT itself: AI writing AI. With software production costs heading towards zero, ICS.AI is positioning its platform to enable councils to effectively "vibe code" their own solutions - but within the governance, security, and compliance guardrails that enterprise deployment demands.

The Entrepreneurial Bet

The conversation also touched on Martin's personal journey – staking his pension on a start-up in his fifties.

"I've spent my whole professional career bringing new technologies to market. It's kind of what I do," he reflected. "I was helping Microsoft launch Azure into the UK in 2016, and part of Azure was the first wave of cognitive services - the first AI you could really get your hands on."

He saw the hyperscale cloud vendors commoditising intelligence and recognised the moment: if the technology was good and the cost was falling, adoption in the right sectors was a foregone conclusion. ICS.AI was incorporated in 2018.

His advice to anyone thinking about a similar leap? "You really need that passion for it, because it's going to be hard work. But the benefits of being our age is that I've had successful businesses before. You develop the skills to manage people better and hopefully the experience to make just slightly more right decisions than wrong ones."

Listen to the full podcast episode to hear Martin discuss the Computing AI Leadership Index, the evolving art of the possible in public sector AI, and why Derby City Council's transformation is just the beginning.

For more information about how ICS.AI can help your organisation, get in touch.

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