Gumbrell Returns to Verve as New Unit Launches

Verve is launching a new tech and services platform called Verve Vero, combining proprietary AI with 'real human insight' and cultural understanding. Joining many of the firm's existing senior staff on the new unit's leadership team is company co-founder Jon Gumbrell who is 're-engaging with the business'.

Gumbrell (pictured top left) founded and sold pioneering online fieldwork company The iD Factor before joining with the founders / co-founders of Research Now and Hall & Partners, Andrew Cooper and Mike Hall, to found Verve in 2008. He left relatively early in the company's development to work on other projects including the launch (with Hall) in 2015 of Platform 1, where he was Head of Software Development. He now returns to active involvement with Verve as Chief AI Architect.

Gumbrell is joined by his long-time Platform 1 colleague Abeetha de Silva, who will lead technical development with the help of a team of specialist developers in Sri Lanka.

Verve's recent announcements have placed a strong emphasis on combining new AI features with human and cultural intelligence, to validate and enrich results. While declaring in the spring of this year that AI is being 'designed into almost everything' Verve does, CEO Cooper stressed the interplay of the 'three intelligences' to be used across the company's practice areas of Insight Communities, Insight Consultancy, Culture & Futures and 'AI for Better Insight'. Accordingly the Vero team includes senior representation from the broader business: Melbourne-based Rikki Pearce as Executive Director and Product Lead; Ben McIntyre as Senior Product Manager with duties in both technical development and operationalisation of the platform; Kelly McKnight as Executive Director and Proposition & Marketing Lead; Richard Preedy as Executive Director responsible for leading Client Success; and Gav Holt as Executive Director leading the platform's integrated Customer Centricity and Innovation propositions. Toronto-based Aishwarya Pradhan also joins the company as an AD within Vero, with experience from roles at Mastercard and IPSOS.

Cooper himself will head up the unit, and comments: 'AI not only for efficiency, but for better insights, sits at the very heart of our business and requires us to change almost every aspect of what we do. As CEO, it is essential I head up this game-changing, disruptive technology - with the Verve Vero team absolutely fundamental to rolling it out across our business and client base'.

Web site: www.addverve.com .