Chris.Barker@FutureForesight.com | +27 83 625 8249 | Johannesburg, South Africa
Summary
Founder and business builder with ventures across healthcare, telecoms, weather, education, and AI; documented exits and disposals; R7.4bn raised across ventures; and operating experience inside Africa's largest NGO. The record combines starting from zero, winning institutional backing, scaling delivery, and knowing when to sell, rescue, or close.
Work Experience
Co-founder, GenAI Executive Masterclass Lead & Fractional CAiO | Imagineers.ai
Aug 2023 - Present | Johannesburg, South Africa
Co-founder of Imagineers.ai and lead facilitator of the GenAI Executive Masterclass, having put 725 senior executives through two full days each of hands-on workplace AI: 1,400 executive days across 45 courses, 6,500+ hours of personal frontier-model use, and R30m ARR across training, platform, advisory, and forward-deployed engineering. Also the architect of ExecutiveNavigants, a governed AI workflow platform that answers the model-risk, data-privacy, and reproducibility problems enterprises actually face, and a fractional Chief AI Officer and board advisor on AI strategy, prioritisation, and governance.
Notable engagements included GenAI Executive Masterclass, ExecutiveNavigants - governed AI workflow platform, First Wednesday alumni programme, Fractional Chief AI Officer & board advisory.
GenAI Executive Masterclass | Imagineers.ai
Aug 2023 - Present | Johannesburg, South Africa
Designed and co-facilitate the Imagineers.ai GenAI Executive Masterclass, a two-day, twelve-seat programme run 45 times since August 2023 for 725 senior executives, totalling 1,400 executive days of instruction. Day one builds the technical mental model, covering inference token economics, structured prompting, expert-method decomposition, and measured context degradation. Day two applies it across thirteen use cases from source-backed deep research to driver-based financial modelling, custom assistants, and agentic tooling. Every cohort includes a practical security and data-governance block covering redaction standards, vendor retention settings, jurisdictional risk, and an auditable AI data policy. The offer is deliberately vendor-neutral, with no platform or implementation engagement behind it, which is why the tool advice is blunt. Open-enrolment cohorts are co-delivered with and booked through Daily Maverick as the Daily Maverick Executive AI Masterclass, running in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban and reaching a cross-industry senior delegate base.
ExecutiveNavigants - governed AI workflow platform | Imagineers.ai
Jan 2024 - Present | Johannesburg, South Africa
Conceived, architected, and built ExecutiveNavigants, a governed AI workflow platform of more than 100 authored expert workflows that run a consultant's method and return a finished artefact. The design answers the risks enterprises actually carry with generative AI: hallucinated arithmetic is removed by routing every calculation through a deterministic engine verified by tie-outs and golden tests; stale regulatory knowledge is removed by versioned rule packs checked line by line against primary gazettes and stamped on every output; data exposure is removed by one-shot ingestion, no conversation storage, no file retention, and commercial-API-only model access under POPIA; and uncontrolled behaviour and cost are removed by a no-agent architecture, human gates, per-workflow model pinning, and server-enforced spend caps. Ingestion was benchmarked at 100% word and figure retention across 1,178 pages of real board packs.
Fractional Chief AI Officer & board advisory | Imagineers.ai
Aug 2023 - Present | Johannesburg, South Africa
Holds fractional Chief AI Officer and board advisory mandates, providing executive-level AI direction without a full-time hire: priorities, governance, prioritisation frameworks, and the build-versus-buy judgement calls. The position is deliberately vendor-neutral, with no platform or licence behind the advice, and it sits between the masterclass, which reveals where AI pays, and forward-deployed engineering, which builds the chosen systems inside the client environment and hands them over to the client's own team.
Founding Partner | FutureForesight
Mar 2002 - Dec 2017 | Johannesburg, South Africa
Founding Partner of FutureForesight from March 2002 to December 2017, using the firm as the vehicle for overlapping business builds, strategy consulting mandates, telecoms work, healthcare ventures, turnarounds, weather commercialisation, education technology, and startup investments. Notable engagements included CSIR - BioPad Business Build Advisor, Neotel - Co-founder, RightMed Pharmacy - Co-founder, MTN - Iran Bid and Entry Lead, Aquarius Platinum SA - Turnaround Consultant, Marikana Pit, Onderstepoort Biological Products - Turnaround Consultant, MTN - Investcom Valuations Consultant, Africa Weather - Co-founder & CEO, Eeziphone - Founder / Investor, Critical Thinking Trainer, Seacom - Business Build Lead, National Empowerment Fund / TopTV - Turnaround and Sale Lead, National Empowerment Fund / Stutt Brick - Turnaround and Sale Lead, Vizier eMaths - Active Investor.
Africa Weather - Co-founder & CEO | Africa Weather
Apr 2007 - Sep 2015 | Johannesburg, South Africa
Co-founded and led Africa Weather, the first business to sell weather in Africa, serving 400 South African clients across insurance, mining, and rail, expanding into five countries, building a top-grossing SA-developed iPhone app, reaching R40m turnover at 38% EBIT, and realising R100m across a staged exit over 2017-2022.
Co-founded RightMed Pharmacy, at one stage South Africa's third-largest retail pharmacy by cost of sales, focused on HIV drugs for NGOs and pharmaceutical clients, reaching R450m turnover in 2012 money.
Co-founder & USAID Board Representative | Right to Care
Jan 2001 - Jun 2006 | Johannesburg, South Africa
Co-founder and USAID Board Representative of Right to Care, helping build what became Africa's largest NGO, with R1.7bn in FY21 funding, more than R7bn ethically dispersed, 1.5m HIV patients treated through a 400-clinic network, and pioneering work in workplace HIV treatment.
Notable engagements included Direct Aids Intervention, Chief Operations Officer.
Direct Aids Intervention | Right to Care
Dec 2001 - Nov 2004 | Johannesburg, South Africa
Built Direct Aids Intervention with Alexander Forbes, pioneering the case for employer-paid HIV treatment, presenting to roughly 150 top South African boardrooms, and reaching 100,000 employees across 40 client companies.
Neotel - Co-founder | Neotel
Apr 2002 - Dec 2003 | Johannesburg, South Africa
Co-founded Neotel by building a national fixed-line telecoms model described by British Telecom as operator standard, working with BEE leads to structure a 1.4m-beneficiary deal, raising R2bn in what was then SA's largest BEE deal, and helping win the licence against international operators.
Education
BSc Mechanical Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand (Jan 1986 - Dec 1989)
Graduate Diploma in Engineering (GDE), Mechanical Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand (Jan 1990 - Dec 1990)
MSc Industrial Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand (Jan 1991 - Dec 1991)