About TechGuidr
Twenty-five years of seeing how technology is sold, bought, built and broken.
TechGuidr exists to put that experience on your side of the table.
Founder
Dan Warrener
Former Microsoft Global Data & AI Leader
Most careers stay on one side of the technology industry. Dan’s has crossed all of them, which is the point: TechGuidr is built on understanding both the technology and the commercial incentives wrapped around it. And he still builds: the most recent production AI systems on this site were architected and written by him personally.
- Engineer
- Built data platforms hands-on, from SQL Server warehouses to petabyte-scale cloud estates.
- Architect
- Designed the systems other people then had to live with, and learned from the ones that aged badly.
- Consultant
- Founded and grew a Data & Advanced Analytics practice inside a consulting partner, recruiting the architects, engineers and data scientists around it.
- Seller
- Personally contributed to winning technology work worth up to £1.5m, so he knows exactly how the pitch gets made.
- Buyer and adviser
- Sat on the client side of vendor selections and knows which claims survive contact with delivery.
- Technology leader
- Led Data & AI globally at Microsoft, working with some of the world's largest organisations.
- Transformation operator
- Worked within and led programmes with delivery values up to £25m, including the ones that needed rescuing.
- AI practitioner
- Still designs and ships production AI systems today, from multi-agent architectures to bespoke platforms.
Technology has become easier to buy and harder to choose well.
AI has made that worse. Every vendor now has an AI story. Every consultancy has an AI practice. Every organisation has experiments running somewhere.
Access to AI stopped being the hard part some time ago. What remains hard is judgement: where it creates value, what has to be true underneath it, and when to walk away. That judgement is what TechGuidr sells, backed by the ability to build what the judgement recommends.
Point of view
The AI Realist position.
AI is enormously powerful. It is also not magic, and it removes none of the need for architecture, data, judgement, leadership or organisational change. The hard parts have never been access to the technology:
- Knowing where AI genuinely creates value, and where it does not
- Having the data and architecture foundations to support it
- Redesigning processes rather than bolting AI onto broken ones
- Understanding risk and governance well enough to defend them
- Knowing where human judgement still matters
- Turning demonstrations into production capability
- Knowing when not to use AI at all
Sometimes the right recommendation is to do less. Occasionally it is to do nothing.
The record
Judgement built on things actually done.
A real-time analytics platform across a global aircraft engine fleet. A university moved to remote working for 7,000 people at pandemic speed. Studio analytics for AAA games teams in Azure's earliest days. An IoT and data platform that saved a national charity around £3.5m a year.
25+
years across technology, data and AI
£25m
largest programme delivery value
£1.5m
largest technology work personally won
Microsoft
former Global Data & AI Leader
How TechGuidr works today.
Engagements are senior-led and stay that way: the expert you chose remains accountable, with specialist capability brought in where the work needs it. Advice carries no vendor commissions, reseller incentives or referral fees, and where TechGuidr also builds what follows its own recommendation, that is a separate, explicit engagement.
The work runs from independent assessment and advisory through to hands-on delivery and AI builds, directly for clients, and sometimes as the senior specialist capability inside engagements led by consulting and technology partners. In every case we are explicit about whose interests we represent. TechGuidr is built to compound this capability into a company, not to stay a one-person consultancy.
What others say
“Dan can cut through the noise, find the root cause, and clearly formulate solutions.”
“He combines technical brilliance with a commercial mindset.”
“Dan's insight shifted how we approach AI adoption. Clear, strategic, and grounded in human behaviour.”
Something in your technology estate doesn’t smell right?
A stalled programme, a vendor shortlist that has lost objectivity, an AI investment nobody can evidence. Describe it in a couple of sentences and you’ll get an honest answer on whether it warrants a conversation.