Juan G. Avedillo

I started as a research engineer at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, building robots for surgery. Then a couple of years running European and national R&D programmes, and two years running a small renewable energy engineering company I founded in Valladolid.

From 2008 to 2017 I was at McKinsey, leaving as an Associate Partner and co-leading the Business Technology Office across Iberia and Latin America. The work was strategy and business transformation: the build-up strategy that took a telecoms operator to the largest position in its market, a greenfield bank defined and launched from the holding company, lean transformations in banking and telecoms, and a one-year turnaround of a national carrier worth €100M where I worked as counsellor to the chief executive.

Then I stopped advising and went to run things. At The Cocktail, part of WPP, I was Partner and Chief of Technology Practices — I owned the technology offering and its delivery, sat on the executive committee, and grew the practice from under forty people to over a hundred and fifty while revenue per employee doubled.

In 2020 I joined Nextail, a retail AI company, as Chief Operating Officer with product, data, technology and operations reporting to me. I scaled it from sixty to a hundred and seventy people and ran a full platform migration. In 2023 I became Chief Executive and did the opposite: a turnaround to seventy people, €6M of operating cost out, facilities and vendor contracts renegotiated, and a sale process prepared and led. Doing both jobs in the same company, three years apart, taught me more than either would have alone.

Now I advise investors, boards and founders, and I build companies through Velchanos Partners. Most of my time goes on what AI does to the way organisations decide, specify and build — the same question I have worked on for twenty years, with a new variable that makes the answer matter more.