Meet the Member: Nick Vermeulen
Find out more about Nick Vermeulen, Senior Partner at PwC Channel Islands, who we're delighted to have as the headline sponsor at this year's Chamber Gala Dinner.
Who are you & what do you do?
I am the Senior Partner of PwC Channel Islands. I describe myself as an accountant by training and a technologist at heart. My degree in Computer Science included an Artificial Intelligence module taught by a visiting lecturer from Stanford. The models that we were using back in the late 80s got built into your photocopier so don’t think you can avoid AI. My day job at PwC has been to get the team within the Channel Islands fit for the next wave of technology.
How are you personally using AI at home and at work?
At work we have access to a number of tools ranging from Co-Pilot, ChatPwC all the way up to Harvey. At home I tend to use Grok for research as it is very good at searching and building out a thought into a concrete plan. For coding or repeatable tasks, I use Claude Code, Codex and more recently Grok build. I have built a number of tools which mean you can plan and build applications from scratch to getting them released on Apple’s App Store or running on Google Cloud Platform.
How is your company adapting to the challenges and opportunities of AI?
I have said that AI will allow you to do more more quickly. Making sure you are working on the right things becomes even more important. Training the team on how to use the tools and not inoculate the change has been one of the challenges.
What’s your AI top tip?
Always question what the model is doing and remember it is an enthusiastic intern that is desperate to come up with the answer.
What is your current must read or listen to that’s influencing you professionally/personally?
I have a view within the AI space that AI models will run locally on your devices so your data will not end up in a data centre. So, on YouTube anything by Apple on their foundation models, and MLX or Google on their Gemma model is of interest to me.