The marketing director had a clear request. The board was applying pressure, a specific process needed to be automated, and the brief was ready to execute. Most consultants would have taken the work, delivered the technology, and invoiced accordingly. Maggie Sarfo read the brief, spent two weeks inside the business mapping where time was actually going versus where leadership assumed it was going, and told the client those two things were almost never the same. Then she refused the brief entirely.
What followed was not what the marketing director expected. Instead of an automation rollout, there was a strategy. Instead of a tool deployment, there was a definition of success measured in hours saved, cost reduced, and revenue generated. Twelve months later, the client had saved 7,000 employee hours, the equivalent of releasing three to four full-time employees back into the business every single month, not through speed but through discipline.
That discipline is what Maggie Sarfo has built her career around.
The CEO Who Slows Things Down to Speed Them Up
Maggie Sarfo is the founder and CEO of Meres Consult, a global business growth and AI adoption consultancy based in London, and the single most consistent thing she does for the executives who hire her is make them wait before they spend. In an industry that sells urgency, she sells clarity first.
Her work sits at the intersection of AI strategy, revenue growth, and operational execution. She serves CEOs, founders, and leadership teams across technology, fintech, professional services, and hospitality, operating as a fractional Chief AI Officer, Chief Operating Officer, or Chief Commercial Officer, depending on what the business actually needs. Her proprietary frameworks are used globally and have been adopted into Executive MBA programs at UK universities. Her client outcomes include £1m in net-new revenue generated in twelve months and 514% startup growth over two years. But the number she returns to most often is 7,000. Because that one took a pivot.
From Kantar Research Panels to Gartner Boardrooms
Maggie Sarfo’s career did not begin in AI. It began in understanding how people behave, which, it turns out, is exactly the right foundation for the work she does now.
Her early years at WPP’s Kantar Group placed her at the center of large-scale research projects for clients including BT, Vodafone, and Transport for London. She was a project manager and research panel lead inside a FTSE 100 company, learning how organizations gather information, interpret it, and decide what to do next. That early exposure to the gap between data and decision would surface repeatedly throughout everything that followed.
From Kantar, she moved into membership sales and marketing at PRP Ltd, where she grew a client portfolio from 250 to 500 accounts over four years, delivered 32% year-on-year profit growth, and raised client referenceability from 20% to 65% in a single year. She saved one client group £2.5m by implementing a preferred supplier program. These were not abstract commercial results. They were the product of understanding what clients actually needed versus what they said they wanted, a distinction she would later name as the core of her consulting practice.
Then came Gartner. Four years in a senior client-facing role advising C-suite executives on growth strategy and execution sharpened everything. She helped a high-growth technology client close a 21-year, multi-million-pound deal with a global bank in six months. She mentored and led product direction for a 130-strong EMEA sales force. She learned how the most senior leaders in global organizations think, where their blind spots cluster, and why the most expensive decisions are often the ones made with the most confidence and the least preparation.
She left Gartner, took a deliberate career break, and came back with a question that would become Meres Consult: what would it look like to build the kind of advisory practice that told clients what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to buy?
The Problem She Keeps Solving
Meres Consult launched in January 2017. Nine years later, Maggie Sarfo can describe the failure mode she encounters with almost clinical precision. She calls it the shiny tool syndrome.
“A leadership team sees a compelling demo of an AI tool, with the right level of urgency created. The CFO approves the spend, and then the tool is introduced into the organization with no operating model around it. Six months later, adoption is low, ROI is unclear, and the team is quietly wondering whether AI was overhyped.”
The problem, she argues, is not the technology. It is the absence of a business-led human element around the technology. And the solution is not a better tool. It is a better set of questions asked before any tool is selected.
What are the business goals? Is AI part of the solution? If so, what is the best AI solution? How do we implement and embed it safely? “If you cannot answer these questions,” she says, “you don’t have an AI strategy. You have a technology subscription.”
This is the argument that has made Meres Consult’s frameworks credible enough for university adoption and specific enough to produce measurable results in the field. The Human-centered Growth Model, the Meres AI Adaptability Change Model, and the AI Adoption Leadership Playbook are not theoretical constructs. They are tools built from repeated encounters with the same organizational problem: leadership teams that agree in a room and then take entirely different actions in their own functions.
“Real alignment is demonstrated in behavior,” Sarfo says. “When AI is everybody’s business, it turns out to be no one’s business. Just a series of costly pilots.”
The governance mechanisms she puts in place reflect this. An AI ownership champion, an emotionally intelligent leader capable of translating cross-functional noise into a single outcome aligned with the CEO’s agenda. A fortnightly meeting, her clients have nicknamed the AI ritual, where leaders decide not what to add but what to change and what to stop. A definition of “done” is agreed upon before any solution is built.
The results this produces are specific enough to be verified. A boutique hospitality client is currently booked six months in advance. A mid-sized real estate business, a family company emotionally attached to its culture and afraid that growth would cost them their client relationships, was guided through the Meres Adaptability Change Model and identified a market gap that became an entirely new revenue stream in three months. That new stream took the form of a luxury concierge services company, a business that could serve both their existing clients and the wider real estate industry, launched with an aligned growth and AI strategy from day one.
The 7,000-hour result came from a similar pivot. When early signals showed one department adopting the AI solution quickly while another lagged, Maggie Sarfo did not push harder. She went back to understand what was driving the resistance. It was not a capability issue. It was a trust issue. The rollout was redesigned for that team, reinforced with internal policies and safety guardrails, and the result was more than double the hours saved that a standard deployment would have produced.
“Human plus machine matters to our clients and us,” she says. “We swapped a system usage metric for actual embedded adoption.”
The Question She Leaves in the Room
Meres Consult is currently building its next level of AI capability in stealth mode, with funding conversations open. Maggie Sarfo continues to take on a select number of consulting programs focused on revenue growth and AI adoption, working with growth-stage business ecosystems and professional services firms as a delivery partner for their clients. The fractional Chief AI Officer service remains central to how she works, giving clients ongoing strategic support without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
Her most consistent advice to any executive reading a compelling AI proposal right now is not to move faster. It is to audit what they have already deployed before they deploy anything else. To ask whether AI is actually part of the solution, or whether the solution is a clearer operating model that AI can then serve.
Most of her clients come to her convinced they have an AI problem. They leave understanding they had a business problem that AI was being asked to solve before the business was ready to receive it.
That distinction, between the tool that gets bought and the outcome that gets built, is what Maggie Sarfo has spent nine years making executives see. The ones who slow down long enough to hear it tend to move much faster afterward.
Maggie Sarfo, MBA, CIPD, Certified Business AI Expert, is the founder and CEO of Meres Consult, based in London, United Kingdom. She partners with CEOs, founders, and executive leadership teams to design and deliver business-led AI strategies and commercial growth programs that produce measurable results. To connect with Maggie or learn more, visit meresconsult.com or linkedin.com/in/maggie-sarfo.
