Andrew D Brown

AI Coach at Makers · PhD researcher (part-time), Durham University

I build AI tools myself and help people across a business build their own.

013apps so far

AI and adoption tools

001

Policy Q&A demo

Answers HR questions from a fictional handbook and shows how it found each answer. Keyword search, no LLM.
002

Claude API chatbot

A chatbot I built on the Claude API, with safety guardrails, automated tests and a way to roll back.
003

Worth Building?

Find an AI project your team needs, put an honest number on it, and ask for the go-ahead.
004

Business Value Calculator

Work out the business impact of an AI project, then paste it into a business case.
005

Five Rollout Decisions

My own study tool for Anthropic's Claude Enterprise rollout course: decide first, then see the reasoning.

Learning apps

006

Git and GitHub, Step by Step

Built for one day of a data course: Git and GitHub as a checklist, starting with why it matters.
007

Swipe to Clean

A live class game on phones: clean a messy dataset and watch each decision move the answer. Opens on the host's view.
008

Week 1 Quiz

A live class quiz. Learners join on their phones with a PIN or QR code and play together.
009

Mindset Coach

For anyone learning engineering or data analysis: when it gets hard, one short step at a time.

Research apps

Interactive apps about Radiohead's music, from my part-time PhD at Durham. All the research apps
010

The National Anthem

Be Jonny Greenwood on Saturday Night Live, playing the radio.
011

Let Down

Program the ZX Spectrum that Jonny plays at the end of the song.
012

Creep

Be Jonny and ruin the song with his guitar crunches.
013

Everything In Its Right Place

Cut up Thom Yorke's voice live, and hear how the song is built.

Profile

AI Coach at Makers. I build capability in others and build with the latest tools myself. Thirteen years in teaching, coaching and enabling, thirteen years in IT infrastructure and support and an MSc in Computer Science & Data Analytics. I'm researching AI in practice for a part-time PhD at Durham, a top-five UK university, building AI apps and testing them with real users. I work across Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT and run build-first workshops: people leave having built something, not having watched a demo. Trained in Phillips ROI.

AI capability and adoption

  • Practical upskilling. I teach and design curriculum on Makers' Level 3 and Level 4 AI apprenticeships, for employers in retail, finance, healthcare, travel, higher education and government. I also run CPD for coaching staff on teaching methods and building AI agents. On the agents day, apprentices build a Copilot Studio agent, then calculate its business impact.
  • Choosing what to automate. I developed the Frame → Value → Cost → Verdict business-case framework, and teach a one-page agent plan and a peer stress test for finding and fixing a bot's weak spots before others use it.
  • Reimagining the work. I teach use-case mapping (finding high-time, low-value tasks), root-cause analysis with the 5 Whys and task redesign, so apprentices look for steps to remove, not only speed up.

Governance in practice

GDPR, EU AI Act risk tiers, PII handling and human-in-the-loop gates built into what apprentices build, not added afterwards. In my governance lab, staff built AI policy and EU AI Act bots. At one university, they used what they learned to challenge their AI policy, and it changed.

Experience

  • AI Coach, MakersMay 2026 – Present · London / RemoteI teach and design curriculum on Level 3 and Level 4 AI apprenticeships. I lead and own the Level 4 Data Analyst curriculum and run it for a Big Four client. I rebuilt the agents, stress-testing, governance and sustainability sessions, and built the example agent and video.
  • Data Analyst Trainer, Projecting SuccessMay 2024 – May 2026 · RemoteLevel 3 and Level 4 data apprenticeships with AI-assisted analytics throughout; led Level 3 curriculum design end to end; designed and co-hosted 7 in-person AI hackathons.
  • Data Fellowship Coach, MultiverseJan 2023 – Sep 2023Data Analyst programme (Excel, SQL, Power BI) for 50 apprentices.
  • Earlier
    Tutor and coach, Primary Goal and QA Ltd (2022–24); Python and English lecturer, Coventry and Kingston (2020–22); Academic English lecturer, UK, Australia and Germany (2011–20); IT support and infrastructure, Siemens, Ladbrokes, University of Cologne Business School.

Education

  • PhD (part-time), Durham University · 2024–2028 · Designing, building and deploying interactive AI learning apps with Claude Code; evaluated with 57 users in an ethics-approved study; critical analysis of AI app-building platforms
  • MSc Computer Science & Data Analytics, Abertay (2025)
  • MA Music, Oxford Brookes · BA Music Technology, Kingston

Certifications

Azure AI Fundamentals · M365 Copilot Fundamentals · Microsoft Agents in a Day · ROI Institute Master Class certificate (Phillips ROI, 2025) · Oxford AI Programme (Saïd) · Microsoft Certified Educator · Cert LTHE · MBCS · RITTech