David Tyler, Founder and CEO of Outlier Technology, discusses overcoming the main challenges enterprises face when integrating new technologies; how he sees AI evolving in 2025 and beyond; and how UK Businesses should effectively leverage it.
The entire aim of technology is to make our lives easier – but often, businesses find themselves facing headaches when processes don’t mesh well with each other, leaving them spending more time and money creating manual workarounds for the problems they’re encountering.
David Tyler, Founder and CEO of Outlier Technology is a man on a mission to right these wrongs: not by throwing everything away and starting again, but by improving and streamlining existing technologies and processes. The work Tyler and his team undertake leaves businesses happier, healthier and more profitable and productive; here, he explains how:
What inspired you to launch Outlier Technology and what problem does the business solve?
Prior to launching Outlier Technology, I had a long and successful career in technical roles and kept seeing time again technology taking centre stage in so many businesses, but it quickly failing to deliver on any of the promises made during the sales cycle. ERPs, CRMs, reporting platforms, data warehouses – all failing to deliver on their mission.
From my perspective, it was clear that so many organisations were being blinded by technology and its bells and whistles but lost focus on the value it could provide when implemented properly.
Our objective is to make technology actually work for organisations by using less of it rather than more. You can’t fall out of bed without landing on some form of technology – it’s the easy bit when you understand the core fundamentals.
We take a human centred approach to system design – we focus on the outcomes, the decisions and the actions people need to take and we align technology with that to solve real problems.
How do you ‘make systems make sense’? And how does this benefit your clients?
Systems are more than just technology – they’re the people, the decisions the actions, but ‘the people’ part of systems implementations often get lost. We have tools we’ve developed to make sure we maintain the connection between the people, the problem and the technology.
Whether that’s developing technology strategy for non-profits, designing regulatory reporting data platforms for the water industry or building high performance trading systems for banks and commodity traders. We dive as deep as we can into understanding the industry and the problems people face to arrive at the right amount of technology to assist.
We’re not tied to any specific vendors and we’re confident that we can work with most technologies we come across. We’re also mature enough to say when we’re not the right people for the job.
What are the main challenges enterprises face when integrating new technologies? How can they overcome these?
They get lost in the promises which are easy to make at a high level. ERPs are infamous for it. They’re sold on the promise that they’re a one stop shop for pretty much every part of a business’ operations. And they could be, but they’re a toolkit, not a product.
The implementation costs and the timescales are huge, and they very often start with completely unrealistic expectations of what’s involved.
The entry point is ‘this tool is great, everyone uses it so we should use it’. When in reality the entry point should be ‘What problems are we trying to solve’. It sounds so absurdly simple it’s difficult to believe any organisation would get caught out, but it happens time and again.
There’s no silver bullet as such – it’s about mindset, critical thinking and defining the problem in detail before finding the solution. There’s a saying attributed to Einsten: ‘If I were given an hour in which to solve a problem upon which my life depended, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and the remaining five solving it.’
If we spend more time understanding the problem – revisiting it often and from as many angles as we can – the solutions to our problems will very often become obvious.
How do you balance automation with human engagement when building and/or streamlining business processes?
We’ve developed a framework for this where we look at the decisions being made and the actions being taken at different levels of an organisation. We look at the roles of those involved and we look at the model for making the decision. Once we understand those things we can make very targeted decisions about what to automate and why.
It’s so easy to automate for the sake of it and it’s easy to get lost in the fun and spectacle of doing something ‘cool’. But if we focus on the people, the decisions and the actions we can see where it makes sense to add – or remove technology.
What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in scaling Outlier Technology?
The biggest challenge is the classic working in the business vs working on the business. From a personal perspective I love to stay engaged with customers, their problems and the solutions to those problems, but I also need to look at business development, marketing, technology strategy and so on. It’s a real challenge and one where I sometimes wish I had another 12 hours in the day.
But that’s the other challenge – knowing when to step away. It’s so easy to get pulled in and be doing 80-90 hour weeks but that’s not sustainable.
How do you foresee AI evolving during 2025 and beyond? And how should UK Businesses effectively leverage it?
We’re headed for a massive correction. The hype cycle in AI is massive and we’re seeing open source presenting an existential threat to the likes of OpexAI, Anthropic and so on. Their business model is built around technology for which there is no moat.
I think what’s likely is we will see the likes of Microsoft and Amazon focus on helping smaller businesses host their own private models and offer a selection of open source models.
I think the biggest thing businesses can do is start by forgetting that AI exists. Then analyse their business and look at where decisions are made, how they’re made and what can be done to improve those decisions. Once you have that, then start looking at which elements of AI can help you.
The worst thing you can do is ask the question: ‘How can I use AI in my business?’. It’s a non-question – it’s meaningless and it’s pretty much guaranteed to help you waste a lot of time and money on white elephants.
Ultimately, to get anything meaningful out of AI, you need to get very good at defining the problem you want to solve – in detail. That will become the new superpower.
What is next for Outlier Technology?
We understand a lot of the challenges business owners face: They buy technology but then struggle to get the most out of it, or they maybe don’t know the art of the possible.
But the cost of technology consulting and implementation can be a bit of a blank cheque. You go to a large consultancy and it’s all on a day rate with a list of caveats as long as your arm.
So, we’re looking at how we offer fixed price implementation packages for solving the most common technology integration challenges we come across.
For example, we’ve been doing a lot of work with P&L reporting for finance teams and they all end up needing pretty much the same things which is not that surprising.
We’ve developed a set of models that can be adapted and integrated within a couple of weeks for the vast majority of finance teams so we’re looking at rolling that out as our first package.
The aim is to build out our range of packages as we encounter and solve each of these problems, and we think we can do it for between £5k and £10k depending on the problem. It’s a test of our confidence really but it all starts with an honest and open review of where the business is at right now.
