About us
We teach AI to the businesses we'd otherwise build it for.
AI Edge is an AI training business in Reading, co-founded by Will May and Sam Hirsch. We started by building AI systems for businesses, and kept meeting teams who didn't need a system built. They needed to know how to use what was already on their desks.
Who we are.
Two co-founders who run every audit and every session themselves. There is no delivery team behind us and no course platform standing in for us.
Co-Founder & Tech Lead
Will has over two years working in the AI space building AI agents and automations for UK businesses as well as the world's first dedicated reporting software for Human-Wildlife Conflicts, VirtualRanger. He brings deep technical expertise in AI and automation to every project.
Co-Founder & Coaching Lead
Sam has over three years of experience in marketing and community building as well as a year in Start-up recruitment. He founded a group that supports start-ups in scaling their impact, lectures on social enterprise, and led one of Reading's largest student societies. He brings expertise in storytelling, strategy, and digital media.
Advised by
Jim is an entrepreneur and business consultant with over 25 years' experience in technology. He is a three-times published author with Wiley (NYSE: WLY), host of the UnNoticed Entrepreneur podcast, an advisory board member of Aizee, an AI agent company, and an associate partner at HGKC, a high-growth consulting company. Jim is also the AI subject matter expert for The Access Group.
Jim advises us on the programme and how it is sold. He does not deliver the sessions.
Where we came from.
Our session at the Thames Valley AI Group, Reading, September 2026.
We spent our first year as an automation and consulting shop, building AI into UK businesses: an 18-month partnership with an 18-person bathroom retailer covering contractor matching, a CRM rebuild and a customer chatbot; a voice agent for a luxury watch dealer; a discovery-call agent workforce for a consultancy; a WhatsApp reporting service used by rangers in the Masai Mara.
The pattern in every project was the same. The technology was rarely the hard part. What decided whether it stuck was whether the people around it understood what they were working with, and most teams had never been taught. They had been sold tools, shown demos, and left to it.
So we made teaching the main thing. We still build automation and still take consulting work, but the front of the business is now a three-month programme: an audit of where the hours go, training on the tools a team already pays for, and the result measured at the end.
The first team we trained was an accountancy practice, in September 2026. Accountants are where we start, because they hold more of other people's sensitive information than almost any other business their size, and if the security holds there it holds anywhere.
How we work.
We built it before we taught it
Everything in the programme came out of work we delivered: contractor matching, a CRM rebuild, voice agents, a chatbot handling real customers. We are not repeating a course someone else wrote.
Your work, not a demo
Nobody learns AI by watching someone else use it. Every session ends with a task to go and apply to your own work, and the review week after it tells us what stuck.
Security before enthusiasm
Most teams already have staff pasting company data into tools nobody approved. The draft AI policy arrives with the audit report before any training starts, and Security is a whole module once people are working on real tasks.
A number at the end, not a feeling
The same assessment call runs in week one, week four and week eleven. The difference is the result, averaged across the team. If it falls short, six more weeks at no charge. If it still falls short, your money back.
Where we work.
We are based in Reading and work with owner-led service businesses across the Thames Valley. The programme runs online, one session every two weeks, so nobody leaves the desk for a day. We work with the Berkshire Growth Hub and its Skills & Business Hub, and with the Thames Valley AI Group.
Want your team using AI properly?
Book a fifteen-minute call and we'll talk through what the programme would cover for your team.
Book a Free Discovery Call