15 minutes with: Ben Jones

What is your background and what brought you to PA?

You couldn’t get two more different worlds, ski racing and computer science, but somehow, I ended up in both. I was pretty handy on the slopes, but my Olympic dream didn’t quite materialise. Instead, I swapped skis for screens, starting out as a programmer before moving into software architecture. From there, I found myself drawn to leadership roles and projects that sat right at the intersection of innovation, where technology meets brand.

Joining PA’s transport team was a phenomenal opportunity. Our Global Innovation and Technology Centre (GITC) in Cambridge was a huge draw – a place where scientists, makers, creators, and strategists come together to solve the toughest challenges. It’s that unique blend of minds and disciplines that hooked me – and the rest is history.

What’s different about PA?

As I mentioned, the GITC is a feather in our cap that nobody else has got. You’ve got countless inventions coming out of that one building alone which is quite amazing.

This makes PA an engine of consulting services, truly able to transform and reinvent an organisation. We’ve got a mix of scientists, creatives, designers, and even robotics specialists. There’s always a specialist that can hone and create ingenious inventions and moments at PA which is unique versus other consultancies.

How would you describe your job to someone you’d just met?

I’d say I’m a disruptor. Most people help companies keep up. I try to help them break away and think differently. When other people ask how they can make things better, I ask what if you did something completely different? I love provocative thinking and encourage that all around me. All in the interest of finding the very best for my clients.

In recent years, how was your work changed?

The world has never changed as fast before now. Technology changes are moving so quickly that we’re now at a tipping point.

Since joining PA, I’ve seen a balance shift. I always lived in the vision strategy space. But today I see the value of delivery more than ever before. There are so many consultancies out there that just can’t deliver. At PA, there’s an ability to deliver projects in such a brilliant, agile, and transparent way.

What do you see as the main impact of AI?

Such a huge question. AI changes everything. The internet was an incredible inflection point, but it unfolded over years. This moment is different – AI is evolving so rapidly that adoption is becoming almost immediate. It’s an inflection point like no other. For businesses, AI collapses the cost and time of insight, creation, and execution, and shifts the role of strategy from static planning to real-time adaptability.

What are you most excited about in your industry right now?

What really excites me right now in the transport industry is autonomy. I was in San Francisco recently and got driven around in a car with no driver. It made me realise autonomy across any enterprise is exciting, but in transport it just feels so right. The metro in London has been doing it for decades – but now we’re seeing that same concept extend into every mode of transport, every journey, and every touchpoint.

I lead PA’s work on intelligent airports, and we’ve recently helped multiple airports build autonomy into their operations, from aircraft turnaround to passenger flow management. In collaboration with airports, such as Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, we have supported the development of solutions such as Deep Turnaround, an AI-driven tool that brings together a variety of data sources to monitor and predict turnaround performance. Based on implementations so far, this has uncovered the potential to reduce last-minute gate changes, a leading cause of delays, by as much as 50 percent.

Imagine an end-to-end journey that’s intelligently connected: from booking your flight, to your journey through the airport, to arriving at your hotel – everything optimised, personalised, and safe. Autonomy, when done right, has the potential to completely redefine how we move, how we travel, and how we experience the world.

Are there any projects you’re most proud of?

There are many projects I’m proud of, but one that really stands out is right at the cutting edge of building intelligent airports. One of the largest European hub airports approached us with a challenge: they were sitting on an ocean of data with tens of thousands of data assets collected from across the entire airport ecosystem, but much of it was underutilised. They knew there was value hidden within the data, but they weren’t sure where to start or how to turn that data into operational intelligence.

Our job was to explore, investigate, and expose the opportunities within that data to help the airport operate more efficiently and deliver a better passenger experience. So, we put our data scientists to work – not just analysing existing datasets, but consolidating two that had never been brought together before: operational data and passenger flow data.

That collision revealed insights that fundamentally changed how the airport could think about running itself, from predicting passenger congestion before it happened to proactively re-allocating resources in real time.

For me, it was one of those projects that changed how people think. It wasn’t just about finding insights, it was about inspiring an organisation to reimagine what was possible when they brought AI and data together intelligently. I hope the airport continues to take the approach forward, because it shows what the future of data-driven operations could look like for airports worldwide.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to follow a similar career path to you?

The truth is, you have to do the hard work in any career. You need to build the foundations and really understand the craft you’re interested in. I started as a software engineer, then moved into architecture, and that grounding gave me the depth I needed to step into leadership roles later on. You’ve got to understand the visceral elements of the job, what makes it tick and then equip yourself with the right tools.

Technology can amplify your impact in ways that weren’t possible before, but only if you’ve done the groundwork to understand what really matters to the people and systems you’re trying to improve.

The next piece of advice is to find something you’re truly passionate about. That’s the most foundational thing you can do. If you’re not passionate, what’s the point? But if you are, you’ll turn anything into gold. For me, that passion was disruption – finding opportunities to apply technology to what others thought was impossible. When you start to see the results of your efforts – innovation that inspires, that feels intuitive and human – that’s when the magic happens.

And finally, find your tribe. Surround yourself with people who think like you, who challenge you, who inspire you, and who push you to be better. The right tribe will pull you through when things get tough and remind you why you started. I’ve been lucky to find mine – people who share a vision for creativity, innovation, and making a difference. Once you have that combination – passion, purpose, and people – your career stops being a path and starts being an adventure.

What are your future goals either professionally or personally?

To be more me. I’ve previously tried to fit a mould and be someone and I’m not, for example by wearing a suit. And that’s just not what I can do. Sometimes you have to be unapologetically you.

Personally, my goal is to be more creative. I love the freedom I get from travel, when I’m away and seeing more, I have more ideas and take different cultures in.