Matt Falconer is the co-founder and chief executive of Ares Intelligence, a London-based company whose AI interviewer conducts 20-minute voice conversations with employees about how their work is done, then turns the findings into a ranking plan where AI should be applied.
He joined IBM as a software engineer at 18 and later ran an invention workshop for Automation Anywhere before starting a business with Alfie Ranstead. The pair first built Instruct, a workflow automation platform that venture firm Creandum said in October 2025 had backed, and the firm said Lakestar was also an investor.
Here he tells Business Matters why too many companies are buying AI the wrong way, what it costs to achieve perfection and why putting a human face on Ares is the wrong answer.
What are you currently doing at Ares Intelligence?
I am the co-founder and CEO of Ares Intelligence. Most companies know they need to do something with AI, but don’t know where to start. We help them faster.
Ares uses AI to talk to employees about how their work is done, then turns those conversations into clear plans and priorities for where AI will make the biggest difference, so businesses can move from uncertainty to adoption with confidence.
My time is split between product, sales, and customer and partner relations, with travel, events and lots of unpleasant admin in between. At this stage nothing is too big or too small, and no two weeks are the same. We work with businesses across manufacturing, automotive and private equity, among other sectors. On any given day I can go from a product discussion to a customer meeting in Europe or the US.
On the product side, I’m deep in the details that decide whether people feel comfortable talking to Ares. It should feel close, reliable and safe. Even the length of the pause before a reply can decide whether someone opens up about their work or shuts it down.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I skipped university and joined IBM as a software engineer at 18. I then moved to solution engineering, where the real job is to understand the customer’s problem before proposing anything.
At Automation Anywhere, I run discovery workshops in Australia, India and Europe. You’ll go from the finance team to the marketing team in an afternoon, each with their own language and priorities, and it can be like whiplash. You have to stay focused and adapt quickly, and that value comes from asking the right questions. But one person can only have so many of these conversations, and you always know you’re working with a partial picture.
When my co-founder Alfie Ranstead and I were initially building our workflow automation platform, we hit the same wall. Companies want the technology but can’t tell them what to automate. The answer is not to find yourself. You need to talk to people and find out what will make your work life better.
We built Ares to run a better workshop, and on a much larger scale, than I could ever do on my own. The goal is to give businesses the evidence they need to choose the right tools and support them to use them.
The technology has moved rapidly, but the organization’s understanding of where its applications lie has not kept pace. Today, many businesses are buying AI and telling their staff to use it without proper training or a real understanding of what is appropriate. That feels backwards to me. If the UK wants to stay ahead in AI, that’s a gap we need to close.
Who do you admire?
I admire people for certain qualities. With Elon Musk, it’s a measure of ambition. He seems to start with an image of what the future will look like, then work backwards to make it real. Rockets and reusable satellite internet sound like science fiction until they don’t exist. He’s willing to take big swings at ideas that most people would reject because they don’t work, and that coupled with imagination and passion for the pursuit is what I love.
I admire Jony Ive for his sense and confidence. They have a clear view of what experience is to be had, and the ability to look at the familiar and see how it works.
Through our investors, I have also been fortunate enough to hear Tom Blomfield and the Collison brothers speak in small settings. From England, ambition can sometimes feel smaller than elsewhere, so looking at the size of what has been built is a useful recalibration.
What stuck with me the most was Tom’s honesty about how hard it is to build a company. Hearing successful people talk honestly about their struggles makes you feel less isolated. It is a reminder that those who seem to have made it must also keep rising.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
I will get our products in front of customers faster. We spent months chasing perfection. Going from 95 percent to 99 percent completion soaks up a huge amount of effort, and customers rarely notice the difference.
Worse, once launched, we usually find the right direction but the details are wrong. A lot of those polishes became things that we ended up rebuilding.
I’ve also been scrappier. At first, it is tempting to think about how you will become a big company. All you need is the first few customers, the first few releases, and enough progress to get to tomorrow. I must have kept a stronger attention on it.
What defines the way you do business?
Speed and quality together. Alfie and I have won a hackathon managed by Anthropic and Meta, and delivering something good, fast, is part of how we think.
Over time we have increased the discipline of what we build. We used to race to deliver a feature because a customer asked for it, only to discover that we hadn’t solved the problem. That has been a major learning experience for us.
Initially, buyers repeatedly requested that Ares provide a human avatar. My instincts are against it, because Ares doesn’t pretend to be human, but we tried a rough version and people found it weird. The voice worked. A face raised our expectations we can not meet, because we are extraordinarily sensitive to what is slightly dead in human appearance.
The basic request is for more immersive conversations. So Ares now shows the screen and shows the notes directly when the interview opens. The goal is the same with better mechanisms. This is the principle: understand what other people want, make a decision about the best solution, and then execute it quickly.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Be bold, and build a domain that you know deeply and care about. It is almost always a longer and more difficult road than the overnight success stories. By the time it clicks, people will call you lucky. Tune out and stay focused on what you want to achieve.
Trust your gut. My instincts often take something away before I can back it up with data.
At the same time, give clear goals and a time frame, such as six months to reach certain milestones. Be prepared to change directions if you don’t get there. We’ve had products launched from large AI labs, and holding on to ideas for too long has real costs. I still wrestle with “what if” pushing things in a little longer, which is exactly why having rules is important.