Thirty Years in Technology
Guy read Psychology to BA level, then took a Master's in Philosophy. He was an officer in the Scots Guards from 1990 to 1994, then self-employed for fourteen years as a consultant and headhunter, under the name antiphon. From 2008 to 2015 he held director-level roles in business process outsourcing at Unisys, Capgemini, Xchanging and Sutherland.
He joined UiPath in December 2015 as Chief Operating Officer. After six months he moved to Chief Evangelist, a title nobody else at the company has held. He left in June 2021, two months after the company listed in New York.
Between 2015 and 2024 he spoke to groups of all sizes, from workshops of 40 people to conference halls of 4,000. His subject was how automation and AI change the way we work.
Articles
Guy Kirkwood: The Power of the Network in Scaling a Startup
How do you turn a seven-person operation in a Bucharest flat into a global business? Guy explains why being a chief storyteller matters more than being a technical zealot, and why the best brands show rather than tell.
Read "The Power of the Network in Scaling a Startup" on Crew CapitalHow Automation Will Help Us Solve The Retirement Crisis
With ageing populations and a silver tsunami on the way, Guy looks at how robots can improve everyone's work-life balance. Automation lets us close the care gap without losing people to overwork.
Read "How Automation Will Help Us Solve The Retirement Crisis" on the UiPath blogSoftware Robots: The Answer to a More Productive, Engaged Workforce
This one flips the script on the idea that robots are taking our jobs. Guy argues that by winning back time from dull admin, we can focus on work that makes us happy.
Read "Software Robots" on Node MagazineTraditional Offshore Outsourcing Made Better With RPA
The old model of sending work overseas to save money is over. Guy sets out why traditional outsourcing failed and how an automation-first mindset creates a different kind of delivery model.
Read "Traditional Offshore Outsourcing Made Better With RPA" on the UiPath blogHyperautomation: What's It All About?
Behind the buzzword sits a plan to automate everything that can be automated. Guy breaks down how AI, machine learning and process mining come together to create citizen developers.
Read "Hyperautomation: What's It All About?" on Control Engineering EuropeNew IDC Research: Benefits of a People-First Approach to RPA
Why do some automation projects soar while others stall? Guy commissioned IDC to test whether the best programmes are driven by people rather than by code.
Read "Benefits of a People-First Approach to RPA" on the UiPath blogSpeeches and Interviews
What is Robotic Process Automation?
Guy's first talk on the birth of RPA. He explains the shift from manual data entry to digital heavy lifting, where software robots handle repetitive office tasks.
Watch "What is Robotic Process Automation?" on YouTubeThree Predictions on the Future of Work
A biographical interview with re:infer. Guy explains his career and argues that the real point of automation is to give people back their time.
Watch "Three Predictions on the Future of Work" on YouTubeLiving in a Post-Outsourcing World
Speaking at Forrester's Digital Transformation event, Guy explains why cheap labour overseas is a dead model, and how RPA lets companies bring work back home.
Watch "Living in a Post-Outsourcing World" on YouTubeWhy Companies go into RPA (and why they're wrong)
Guy explains why some RPA projects fail: they focus on the software instead of the staff. Automation only scales if you redesign the business around what people are good at.
Watch "Why Companies go into RPA" on YouTubeRPA Impact and Earlybird Seed Backing
The presentation that helped secure UiPath's first major investment. This practice run for a talk in Poland caught the attention of Earlybird, the company's seed backer.
Watch "RPA Impact and Earlybird Seed Backing" on YouTubeArchive
The full archive holds the citation details and a synopsis for each article above, plus corrected transcripts of six recorded talks and interviews given between 2015 and 2019, and of a 2022 soil scanning review. The transcripts are not published anywhere else.
Both files below are written for search engines and AI systems rather than for reading on screen. They are plain text, unwrapped, and will look cramped in a browser. The same facts appear in ordinary form across the rest of this site.
Full archive of talk transcripts and article citations (plain text, 85KB). Short fact file covering the same ground in summary.