V2 AI continues to ramp up with further senior leadership recruits
Digital consultancy V2 AI has added further senior leaders in the form of Peter Burns as a partner and Hannah Williams as managing director, with Michael Ewald also joining the firm as a director.
Peter Burns – not of the Accenture variety – crosses from Google Cloud in Sydney, while Williams has spent the past eight years at Amazon. Ewald, the third of V2 AI’s Sydney-based recruits, joins as a director from PwC, with earlier time spent at Contino.
The latest trio of recruits continue the 2023-founded consultancy’s recent efforts to bolster its senior leadership team, with former Deloitte director Ian Nguyen coming on board as a partner in December and Slalom’s Nick Williams added to the list last month.
“These appointments reflect the firm’s continued investment in leadership and enable us to deepen partnerships with existing clients, helping them shape their AI agenda from initial strategy through to broad execution,” said V2 founder and chief Craig Howe. “Simultaneously, this growth expands our capacity to take on new projects and meet the surging demand for agentic AI.”
Peter Burns joins V2 as the firm’s sixth partner, alongside Nguyen and Alvin Oh, who was recruited from Deloitte last year. Prior to his four years as a key account sales executive at Google Cloud, Burns spent close to a decade at analytics company FICO, with earlier lengthy IT stints at First Data Corporation, and Woolworths and Standard Bank in South Africa dating back to 1997.
“I’ve always believed that technical proficiency is secondary to understanding a client’s commercial landscape, and in my career across data analytics and systems architecture I’ve seen a recurring theme: the ‘last-mile’ gap,” Burns said. “It’s the space between deploying high-level tech and actually realising tangible business outcomes. At V2 AI, our mission is to close that gap.”
Hannah Williams meanwhile joins V2 as a managing director with a focus on client growth and partnerships from Amazon, where she most recently served as APJ head of satellite internet division LEO and previously held a number of senior roles for AWS. Earlier, she spent five years at SAP, including as A/NZ vice president, following a career start with the UK’s foreign affairs office.
Lastly, Michael Ewald becomes V2’s latest director addition, having been a managing director at PwC for the past two years. Previously, he was APAC director of technology & engineering for Cognizant acquisition Contino, alongside Howe, and has spent considerable time in IT roles within the financial services sector, including overseeing analytics & insights at Commonwealth Bank.
