Dr. Sophia Fannon-Howell
Founder, Aterra AI
I've spent twenty years deploying AI and data technology inside some of the world's most complex and commercially high-stakes organisations.
That experience taught me what it actually takes to get innovation from idea to production, and how rarely technology alone is the answer.
Those two insights sit at the heart of everything Aterra AI does.
My Advisory
I spent twenty years deploying AI and data technology inside energy majors, most recently as head of innovation for bp's commodity trading business, where I delivered bp's first production generative-AI application and built the governance frameworks for compliant AI at scale, and established an innovation lab that cut time-to-delivery by 45%.
Previously, I built data foundations across Azure, AWS and Palantir Foundry, led a 130-person global data organisation building analytics and AI products for 5 businesses.
What I observed consistently is that innovation fails not because of ambition or technology, but because of the absence of strategic alignment, organisational capability, and the structures needed to take ideas from experiment to production.
I now work with a small number of organisations each year to help them solve precisely that problem.
My FarmerFirst Mission
Aterra AI's second mission emerged from a different kind of observation.
As a Trustee of the British Hen Welfare Trust, I began to understand the economic pressures facing UK farmers: margins so thin that even those who want to farm sustainably and at higher welfare standards are constrained by a system that consistently extracts value from them rather than returning it.
At the same time, my professional experience had shown me how powerful technology can be as a tool for system change when it is designed with that intention from the start.
FarmerFirst is the result of asking a simple question: what would it look like to use technology not to extract value from a food system, but to redirect it back to the farmers at its heart?
The answer is a farmer-governed digital platform, co-designed with farmers, and built to ensure that the value their work generates stays with them and the communities around them.
What Connects the Two
These are not separate endeavours.
My advisory work and FarmerFirst are expressions of the same conviction: that technology becomes transformational when it is strategically purposeful, and designed in genuine service of the people it is meant to help.
That is what Aterra AI is building.
