About Thoughtcoast

Built inside a real business.

Thoughtcoast builds the AI systems inside UK service businesses — the quoting, booking and back-office brains that pay for themselves.

Nothing here is theoretical. Every system was built inside a real company, runs in production every day, and answers to a real P&L.

Work with us The systems →

The founder

The person behind it.

Thoughtcoast was founded by Charlie Hulme — an operator-engineer who builds the production AI and automation a multi-brand services group runs on, and runs the group's day-to-day operations from the same desk. Before tech, he spent a decade behind the camera on BBC and ITV productions.

Download his CV

The full CV: download it, or print this page (⌘P) for a formatted copy.

Charlie Hulme

What I do.

Build

Production LLM and RAG systems, mostly TypeScript and Python on PostgreSQL with pgvector. Every change to retrieval has to beat the previous version on a gold set of real cases before it ships — the eval harness that enforces this is public.

Connect

The unglamorous middle: CRM, telephony, field-service, accounts and e-sign joined into one flow with n8n and plain REST APIs, deployed on Cloudflare and Vercel. Built idempotent, so a retried webhook can't book the same job twice.

Run

The business itself: budgeting, forecasting, unit economics and the monthly board pack for the same group the software serves. Every build starts from a line in the P&L, and I answer for whether it moved.

Experience.

One business, growing responsibility. Figures banded for confidentiality.

Jan 2025 – present

UK multi-brand services group

Business Manager — Technology, Systems & AI

  • Run day-to-day operations of a ~30-person, multi-£m business; own its technology, data and AI.
  • Built an organisation-wide, eval-gated LLM knowledge platform; retrieval recall@5 up from ~0.05 to ~0.85.
  • Shipped AI-assisted instant quoting; online conversion up 2×+.
  • Automated roughly half of routine CRM work — ~200 staff-hours handed back each month.
  • Restructured sales incentives; signed sales up double-digit year on year. Adviser to the board on growth and M&A.

Jan 2023 – Jan 2025

UK multi-brand services group

Technical, Media & Business Systems Lead

  • Designed the unified SaaS and API architecture the group still runs on; licence spend cut ~18%, dispatch time down from 12 minutes to 3.
  • Led a remote squad of four developers; launched a self-service booking portal; migrated the brand sites to Astro with no loss of search rankings.

Jan 2021 – Jan 2023

UK multi-brand services group

Videographer & Editor

  • Built the in-house video and content capability the group still runs.

2017 – 2021

Broadcast & commercial productions

Camera Assistant / Operator, TV & Film (freelance)

Foundations.

  • BA (Hons) Film Production, University of Portsmouth.
  • 3 A-Levels (A*–C) · 8 GCSEs (A*–C), including English and Maths.
  • Engineering is self-directed and proven in production, not certificated.

What I'm looking for.

  • AI & Automation Lead — own AI from strategy to production.
  • Head of AI & Operations — build the AI and run what it serves.
  • Solutions Architect — design the systems, then ship them.

Permanent or fractional · UK, remote / hybrid.

Work with us — the fractional arrangement →

Get in touch.

One email. A personal reply within a working day.

Email us Charlie on LinkedIn
github.com/CharlieHulme CV as PDF