UnlikelyAI bolsters leadership team

London-based artificial intelligence company UnlikelyAI has appointed Rakesh Harji as chief operating officer and Graham French as chief technology officer as it prepares to scale its enterprise AI platform.

The dual appointments come as demand grows for explainable and auditable AI systems that can be deployed across regulated industries.

Rakesh joins from AI legal platform Lawhive and previously spent almost seven years as chief operating officer at fintech unicorn Zilch, where he helped grow the business from its first employee to a company valued at $2.2 billion. 

At UnlikelyAI, he will focus on building the operational and commercial foundations needed to scale the business.

Rakesh added: “The conversation for enterprises has fundamentally changed, and it’s no longer about whether AI is capable, but whether it can be trusted, explained and held to account. This is a problem that goes well beyond any one sector. 

UnlikelyAI has a technically distinct answer to this problem, and regulated industries, where the stakes around trust and explainability are highest, are a natural place to initially demonstrate that. I know how rare it is to find a company with both the technical foundations and the commercial momentum to make that real.” 

Graham joins after serving as chief product and technology officer at Ada Health. 

His career also includes senior engineering and technology leadership roles at Amazon, Meta and Prime Video, where he helped develop AI-powered consumer technologies. 

Having advised UnlikelyAI since 2023, he will now lead the company’s technology and research strategy as chief technology officer.

Graham added: “I’ve spent my career building ambitious AI and getting it into production in places where being wrong is expensive. 

“What UnlikelyAI is doing is technically distinct, with neurosymbolic AI that produces outputs you can audit and explain, built for the industries where that matters most. 

“Today, AI you can actually trust and interrogate isn’t optional, but it’s also genuinely hard to build. 

“My focus is making that achievable at scale, so that enterprises can adopt the platform largely themselves, satisfy their risk and compliance teams, and reach deployment decisions at pace.”

Both appointments support UnlikelyAI’s ambition to make its neurosymbolic AI platform more accessible to enterprise customers by enabling organisations to move AI projects from pilot programmes into full-scale deployment.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, founder and chief executive of UnlikelyAI, added: “The trust gap in enterprise AI is significant and growing.

“Businesses across sectors are discovering that the AI tools they’ve invested in can’t get past the pilot stage, because they can’t provide the accuracy, explainability or auditability that production demands. 

“Graham and Rakesh join at exactly the right moment – Graham to build the technical architecture that makes our neurosymbolic platform deployable at scale, and Rakesh to build the operational foundations that get it in front of the businesses that need it most.” 

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