Dan has over 15 years of extensive experience in manufacturing, food science, and AI technologies, with a strong focus on digital transformation in the process industries. He has held multiple leadership roles across the Supply Chain at British Sugar. Currently, Dan leads British Sugar’s strategic adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, including digital twins and generative AI, to enhance operational efficiency and innovation.

He holds an MSc in Biochemistry and brings a multidisciplinary perspective to industrial digitalisation efforts.

Plenary presentation

Codifying Decision-Making: British Sugar’s AI-Driven Operational Framework

British Sugar is confronting a critical challenge: preserving a century-long legacy of operational excellence amidst a rapidly evolving workforce and rising complexity in sugar processing. Traditional expertise – once built over decades – is now eroding as workforce tenure declines and fewer individuals pursue deep technical mastery.

In this session, Dan outlines how British Sugar is responding to this burning platform through a data-driven, AI-augmented strategy focused on decision success. Central to this approach is the creation of the Advanced Insight Centre, which leverages historical know-how, real-time data, and generative AI to improve decision-making across operations.

The presentation will introduce a practical framework for a modern decision support system, demonstrating how digital twins, predictive models, and agentic AI can replicate expert insight and institutional knowledge. Dan will explore how structured AI overlays—such as strategic alignment, priority filtering, and capacity assessment—transform decision-making from a fragmented, human-dependent process into a scalable, resilient system that learns and improves over time.

This talk is a compelling case study on how industrial organisations can move from reactive problem-solving to proactive, knowledge-driven operations – preserving legacy while embracing the future.