1. What’s the next big innovation or development in the built environment that you’re most looking forward to?
My area of expertise is mission critical design, which is essentially data centers. This is a sector that has seen extraordinary expansion and change over the last few years, with the construction of many large facilities around the world. There has been much focus recently on these facilities and concerns raised about their environmental impact, given the substantial amounts of power and water that they consume. However, the digitization of the economy and the ever-growing reliance upon digital services is dependent upon data centers. The growth in AI is serving to accelerate this and the UK Government has committed to expanding the UK’s AI and digital infrastructure. So as a member of the Data Centers team at Cundall, I see this as a very exciting but very challenging time.
One of the greatest challenges currently facing the UK is the need to decarbonise our economy. Currently, up to 14% of the UK’s carbon emissions can be attributed to the use of fossil fuels to heat the UK’s housing stock. However, the work the Cundall team has done on data center projects in Europe has shown us the potential for supplying district heating networks with residual heat from data centers. The UK currently doesn’t have anything like the district heating infrastructure that parts of continental Europe have, but I hope that with the expansion of data centers in the UK, the Government will recognize the potential for linking this to decarbonisation of the UK’s housing stock, by encouraging investment in large-scale district heating networks and other viable heat-reuse pathways from data centres.
2. What have younger team members pushed you to rethink?
Younger team members have pushed me and others in the leadership team to rethink how we deliver work, particularly around digital workflows and sustainability expectations. Their confidence with automation and AI-assisted design has challenged us to modernize our processes, as they naturally adopt tools for modeling, clash detection, documentation, and early-stage concept generation etc. They also bring a sharper instinct for embodied carbon and energy-efficiency trade-offs, often questioning long-standing assumptions about cooling strategies, material choices, and levels of redundancy. Their perspective has raised the bar for what good engineering looks like and encouraged us to evolve both our technical approach and our team’s overall skill mix.
3. Which part of your business process do you think AI will struggle to replace?
AI is becoming deeply embedded in how we design and operate buildings, taking on everything from repetitive documentation to advanced modeling and simulation. But the part of our process it will struggle to replace is the experienced engineer on site: the person who can walk into a plant room, sense when “something is not right”, and diagnose issues that no model predicted. When commissioning figures don’t align with expectations, it’s that blend of practical intuition, real-world understanding, and the ability to interpret complex, imperfect, and often unpredictable installations that makes the difference. AI can analyze data, but it cannot replicate the judgment built from years of seeing how systems behave once they leave the drawing board and meet the realities of construction, workmanship, and operation. This human insight remains central to delivering safe, resilient, and truly reliable critical system. Beyond technical judgment, successful delivery also depends on the human coordination and responsibility that hold a project together: leading teams, resolving issues collaboratively and taking ownership when decisions have real-world consequences. The day-to-day work of mentoring and upskilling—helping early-career engineers grow, embedding high-performance behaviors, and building a culture where people feel supported to succeed—is fundamentally human. These activities rely on interaction, care, and consistent support.
In a sector that is still young and evolving, this human element is not just valuable – it is essential to shaping the next generation of engineers.
4. How do you see the role of data centers evolving as digital infrastructure demand accelerates?
Data centers are often designed at scale and are located in industrial areas, away from centers of population, where land is inexpensive and supplies of water and power are available. However, with the development of the Internet of Things and other real-time digital services, such as self-driving cars, latency is going to become ever more important. This will tend to draw data centers into urban areas, a trend already visible with the rise of ‘edge’ data centers. This opens up the possibility of true Smart Cities, where digital services become a utility alongside power, water and drainage. Small-scale data centers embedded within towns and cities could be networked to provide distributed resilience. The heat they generate could be fed directly into local district-heating networks, where it would be immediately available to users, avoiding the need for costly and inefficient transmission pipelines from remote, out-of-town facilities.
