Connecting technology with people, work and opportunity.

Long before AI dominated the headlines, Isa's work was about a simpler question: how do people get a fair shot at a good working life?

For more than a decade he worked across education, employability, apprenticeships and skills — first in youth education and consultancy, then as Project Director at the Pathway Group and the Asian Apprenticeship Awards, which he helped grow into the UK's largest apprenticeship awards ceremony celebrating diversity of talent.

As CEO of the BAME Apprenticeship Alliance and Curator of the Apprenticeship Diversity & Social Mobility Forum — founded during lockdown and drawing hundreds of attendees — he became a national voice on representation, social mobility and access to opportunity, working with employers, training providers and public sector stakeholders across the country.

Then artificial intelligence arrived — and with it, the biggest shift in what work means in a generation. Isa moved directly into it. In 2023 he founded the AI Work & Skills Forum to bring business, government, technology and education into the same conversation. In 2024 he founded CoTalent AI to do the practical work: helping organisations — and especially their non-technical teams — move from simply having AI tools to using them confidently, productively and well.

Today he speaks and moderates internationally — from LEAP, DeepFest and EDGEx in Riyadh to stages across London — and in 2025 delivered an AI workshop at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His argument is consistent: AI is best understood not as a replacement for people, but as a technology that can democratise capability itself — if we choose to make it so.