I'm Martin. I've spent the last decade helping organisations figure out what technology can actually do for them, not what the vendor deck says it can do.
I got into AI before it was called AI. In 2014 I was building NLP pipelines on IBM Watson to sort customer emails for a pan-European retailer. In 2017 I conceived what became the first full-scale AI implementation in global financial services, a next-best-product recommendation engine for Ulster Bank, built on Salesforce Einstein. The Irish Times wrote about it.
That's kind of my thing. I tend to spot where things are going before the hype arrives, then figure out how to make it useful in the real world, for real teams, with real constraints.
For the last eight years I've been doing that inside Salesforce, most recently as Principal Technical Architect for Heroku across EMEA. Talking to CTOs and engineering leaders about platforms, architecture, and the gap between moving fast and moving in the right direction. Directly influencing $9M+ in deals, but more importantly, having the conversations that actually change how people build.
Right now that conversation is about AI. Not the breathless version, the practical one. What does it mean for your team's velocity? Your product strategy? Your market position? Most companies are treating it as a workflow upgrade. I think that's the wrong frame entirely.
Steam Hammer is where I write about that gap. Grounded takes. No fluff. The kind of thinking I'd share in a good conversation over a coffee.
If something here resonates, I'm easy to find.