Clifton Cunningham joins Nearform as Senior Vice President for Advisory & Alliances

Clifton brings 20+ years of experience in building engineering organisations that focus on production over pilots. During his tenure leading technology at Mail Online (within Daily Mail), he increased monthly users from 50 million to 220 million and led a platform modernisation that resulted in a high-trust, high-performing product. More recently, over 8 years at Infinitas Learning, he built and led a 230-person product and technology company within the group. He is a speaker in the Node and open source software (OSS) communities, an active OSS author, and as he says himself, “an unapologetic believer that the best technology leaders never stop building”.

As SVP for Advisory & Alliances, Clifton will be bringing his expertise from past successes in leading enterprises as they navigate - and thrive - in times of technology transformation. Bringing a natural curiosity to this role, he commented: “I am focused on understanding the impact of AI-native and agentic engineering practices and how we actually build and grow businesses - not just how we ship code faster. The model is becoming a commodity; the interesting work is in the harness around it, the team that works with it, and the operating model that allows a business to realise measurable gains, rather than burn out on novelty.”

Clifton’s name is already familiar to those in the global OSS community, especially to those who attended Nearform-sponsored NodeConf EU, where he was a wildly popular speaker. “With hindsight, that was probably the moment I should have realised I’d end up here one day.” Clifton notes that he will certainly continue his OSS contributions while continuing to push learnings around AI-native engineering and the many ways it unlocks sources of value for Nearform’s enterprise customers.

“I am very excited to welcome Clifton Cunningham to Nearform as Senior Vice President for Advisory & Alliances. He will lead our continued growth in the AI ecosystem by securing new partnerships and strategic relationships across global tech leaders, in our continued pursuit of delivering excellence in AI-native engineering for our enterprise clients,” says Ciarán Cosgrave, Nearform’s CEO.

Clifton will be providing direct, peer advisory to CTOs, while also leading our strategic Alliances across Anthropic, OpenAI and AWS, helping strengthen our position at the forefront of enterprise AI transformation. This will allow us to help our clients stay ahead of the platforms and capabilities that matter most in this fast-changing environment. In collaboration with these, and other key partners, he will develop differentiated go-to-market opportunities and ensure we are strategically aligned with the platforms and capabilities shaping the future of AI.

Alongside this, Clifton will lead our CTO Advisory offering, in response to demand from our clients and others in the enterprise market. The CTO Advisory model deepens relationships at the C-suite level and positions Nearform as a trusted strategic partner to technology and business leaders navigating large-scale transformation. The focus will be on helping customers move from AI experimentation to meaningful enterprise adoption, combining strategic advisory with our strengths in modern engineering, data and AI delivery.

While the “age of AI” is relatively new, our track record of trust and success among the world’s leading, most complex, and highly regulated enterprises is not. As we have over the past 15 years, Nearform continues its mission to deliver on the promise and potential of technology to solve business problems and user needs, with our appointment of Clifton further strengthening that commitment.

If you're working through how to move AI from pilot to production in a complex or regulated environment, Clifton is now taking a small number of CTO advisory conversations. Get in touch - we’d love to discuss how we can be your partner in driving enduring business impact.