Gavin Wye Product · AI · Strategy

About Gavin Wye

I work with teams to build AI-powered organisations that scale.

I'm Gavin Wye, a product and design person. I work on product, AI and strategy, most recently at GovTech Barbados. I care about the way decisions get made and the speed with which we make them, so that we can learn more quickly. All of that is in service of users' needs. I'm human-centred.

How I work

Start from the user's problem. Ship something better than what exists, even if only a little better. Learn from real use. Decide what to keep and what to stop. There's nothing new there, but putting AI to work in that process can help teams go faster. I have one belief: if you don't go as fast as you can, sustainably, someone or something will overtake you — whether that's a competitor or the environment changing around you.

How I use AI

I'm hooked on this drug. I use AI daily, and I worry about how much I rely on it. But it's not going away, and I've found it really can help me and others do more, more quickly.

I use AI as a thinking partner. It is more respectful of other people's time: I can work an idea out until it is worth discussing, instead of pulling someone into a half-formed thought. It's often referred to as rubber ducking.

It writes all my code now.

I'm dyslexic, which for most of my life meant the writing got in the way of the thinking — the effort went into spelling and building sentences rather than into the idea. AI takes that friction out, so the effort goes where it should. Writing is thinking.

AI is not doing the thinking. Most of these posts start as a long-form journal entry, written by hand. AI helps me refine it afterwards. The thinking happens on paper first.

I'm building tools with it too, mostly to scratch my own itches: an assistant that keeps my life admin in order, chases deadlines and sends me a briefing each morning; a trainer for my French verbs; a scanner that turns my handwritten journals into text I can search; and a widget for commenting on prototypes and drafts. At work the same idea becomes skills that carry a team's standards into the tools it already uses.

Most recently

I helped build GovTech Barbados, the Government of Barbados's digital service, alongside a brilliant team from Public Digital. It was one person when I arrived and thirty when I left. What we handed over was capability at national level: a country able to build and run its own digital services, not a document describing how.

  • By June 2026, 72% of the team's commits were made with AI, up from none six months earlier.
  • A month after I handed over it was still 53%. The way of working stayed after I left.

Before that

26 years in digital product design and user experience. I have a BA Hons in Industrial Design from the Sheffield Institute of Art and Design.

I've worked across the UK Government – on citizen-facing services for:

And in the private sector for:

  • Virgin Money
  • Nando's worldwide
  • J.K.Rowlings' Pottermore
  • Visa
  • Channel4

Impact goes into some of that work in more detail.

Working with me

The best way to start a conversation is email: [email protected]

Where I am

I live in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc in the French Alps, and the mountains are where I go to rest and recover. That usually means climbing, skiing or riding an e-mountain bike: sometimes an easy day out, sometimes a steep couloir, a night in a tiny mountain hut, or a 75km ride that turns into type two fun — hard at the time, brilliant afterwards.