"Having broken free from his background in coding and technology, Jon Block made a career out of being an ""acceptable face of geek"" in advertising technology before founding Syllepsis, where he now helps organisations work out what to actually do with AI beyond generating enthusiastically incorrect personal biographies.


Jon started his media career as an engineer at ITV, the UK's largest commercial broadcaster. With his Natural Sciences degree from Cambridge and the Royal Television Society's Young Technologist of the Year Award, he seemed destined for a back-room career. However, he seized the chance to change this when he created and then led ITV’s multi-platform commercial innovation programme.


His ad tech journey saw him lead product vision at Videology (helping build the seeds of what became ITV's Planet V platform), Captify, and JCDecaux's ad tech start-up, VIOOH, where as Chief Product Officer he revolutionised the Out of Home advertising landscape.


Since 2015, he's been building machine learning and AI technologies long before everyone else decided to rebrand their products as ""AI-powered"". Now through Syllepsis, Jon works with organisations, from ambitious SMEs to established enterprises, helping them move from AI strategy to actual implementation: AIs trained on their expertise, agentic systems that do useful work and AI-enhanced workflows that deliver measurable impact.


In his spare time, he's a father of three, a photographer, a keen player of role-playing games and jazz standards (on the ukulele), although rarely at the same time. He also still writes his own biography in the third person, which is, frankly, a bit odd."