About / Christian Prokopp, PhD
Technical depth and commercial judgement.
I help CEOs, founders and leadership teams make difficult decisions about technology, data and AI.
Bold Data is my independent CTO, CDO and executive advisory practice. I advise on strategy, investment and product decisions. My experience of leading teams and building systems helps me assess what a proposal will mean in practice.
From engineering to executive responsibility
At Holland & Barrett, I was Director of Engineering, Data and Analytics (CDO). As Partner, International Engineering Practice at Think Big, a Teradata company, I led a practice of more than 125 people across four continents.
My experience also includes interim VP Data Strategy at Worldpay and Chief Data Officer at Brady PLC. Earlier, I held engineering leadership roles at Big Data Partnership and Rangespan, later acquired by Teradata and Google respectively.
I founded Bold Data in 2021 and co-founded Semaverse.ai. My advisory experience includes early AI product work at Camunda and a non-executive director role supporting a global telecommunications company on technology and AI strategy.
Experience covers my roles, leadership responsibilities and the decisions behind that work.
An engineer at heart
I want to understand how a system works and where its limits lie. That curiosity helps me examine proposals from first principles and check the assumptions that could change a business decision.
My selected work shows the technical experience behind that judgement. Building has also taught me that a technically successful system can fail commercially. That experience shapes how I assess an investment.
When a strategic decision needs further evidence, I can investigate directly or supervise a focused prototype with a small expert team. Before starting, we agree what to test, how much work is justified and when to stop.
A technical and commercial foundation
My PhD at Queensland University of Technology focused on machine-learning-enabled information retrieval. I also hold a master's in commerce from the University of Queensland, with work in e-commerce and semantic vector-space research. Data, search and machine learning have been part of my work well before the current wave of AI tools.
How I work
I start with the business decision, its constraints and the consequences of getting it wrong. I examine the commercial case with leadership and the technical assumptions with the people responsible for delivery.
You should expect a clear recommendation: what I would do, why, what remains uncertain and what would change my view. We then agree the decisions, owners and review points needed to act on it.
My involvement can be a focused strategic assessment or ongoing executive and product advice. I challenge assumptions, including my own, as the evidence changes.
Explore the ways we can work together, or email me about a significant technology, data or AI decision.