the person
I build the systems. Then your team runs them.
I am Conrad. I build production AI systems for businesses, on top of the software they already run. Right now those systems are drafting purchasing for approval, reconciling sale-or-return stock for the UK's leading leisure centres, and landing a prospecting briefing on a sales team's desks every Monday.
I am a problem solver first. Give me a process or a problem and the sharpest thing I do is the diagnosis: I map exactly where AI streamlines, assists or automates it, and where it should not go. I like the problems with no tidy off-the-shelf answer, the ones you solve by building from scratch or coming at it sideways. That map is day one of every build, and it is why the systems I ship get used: they start from how the work actually happens, not from what the technology can do.
Before any of this, I founded and ran a business. I started CrewPass to close a gap I had lived inside the superyacht industry, and running it taught me what actually moves a company: cash, time, risk, and the drag of admin that quietly eats people's days. I watched that manual work pull time away from the people doing it, then saw what changed when you put the right tools in their hands and streamlined the operation around them. That is where the passion came from, and it is what I do for other businesses now.
Somewhere along the way I worked out which part I actually enjoy: sitting with the people who do the work, finding the process that eats their week, and fixing it with them. Not writing a report about it. Some weeks that means wiring a 20-year-old back-office system into a clean dashboard. Some weeks it means building a custom engine from scratch for a problem nobody has packaged software for. And every build ends with your team shown how to run it, because a system only earns its keep when the people who own the work own the system.
I have built across systems of every generation, legacy and new, from twenty-year-old ERPs to greenfield stacks, so almost nothing about SME software surprises me any more. Under the hood I use the full modern AI toolkit: custom MCP connectors, retrieval-augmented generation, indexing and embeddings, automated grading and evals, agentic memory, and self-improving agents that sharpen the longer they run. I reach for whichever the problem actually needs. I am based in the UK and work with businesses anywhere: remote-first, on site when it matters.
Away from client work I mentor at Bournemouth University, and I am happy to speak to local business groups about what AI genuinely does for an SME.

Conrad Empson
01the stack, honestly
What I actually build with
No secret sauce, and not an exhaustive dependency list. This is what I actually reach for, across the work on the work page and this site itself.
AI
- Claude (Anthropic API, tool use)
- OpenAI API (GPT)
- Gemini
- Local + self-hosted models
- Google Document AI
- LangChain + LangGraph
- LangSmith tracing + evals
AI techniques
- Custom MCP servers
- RAG + vector search
- Indexing + embeddings
- LLM-as-judge evals
- Agentic memory + checkpointing
- Self-improving agents
Data and infrastructure
- Event sourcing + CQRS
- MongoDB Atlas (event store + projections)
- PostgreSQL
- Cloud Run + Cloud Build CI/CD
- Pub/Sub + Cloud Tasks
- Automated PR review
- Secret Manager
Web and APIs
- Next.js (App Router) + React 19
- TypeScript, strict
- Tailwind + shadcn/ui
- Python 3.12 + FastAPI
- Pydantic v2
- WebSocket status feeds
Integrations
- Stripe (usage-based billing)
- Google Workspace APIs
- OData / REST connectors
- E-signature
- Transactional email
- Webhooks + queued delivery
Training
- 8 Anthropic certificates, all verifiable, listed below
02credentials
Certificates you can verify
Completed Anthropic courses, from the Claude platform and API through Claude Code and MCP. Every one links to its live verification page, because a claim you cannot check is just words.
- Claude 101Anthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- Claude Code 101Anthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- Claude Platform 101Anthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- Introduction to Claude CoworkAnthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- Claude Code in ActionAnthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- AI Fluency: Framework & FoundationsAnthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- Building with the Claude APIAnthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
- Introduction to Model Context ProtocolAnthropicverify (opens in a new tab)
03elsewhere
Third parties, in their words
Coverage and interviews, AI pieces and the founder story alike. Every card opens the original article.
dsnm LtdJune 2026
AI in the Superyacht Industry Part 2
Follow-up on the CrewPass certificate verification engine and its audit trail.
Read the article (opens in a new tab)
Megayacht NewsJuly 2025
Calls for Crew Background Checks to Become Industry Standard Grow Louder
Names CrewPass as the first background-checking service built specifically for yacht crew.
Read the article (opens in a new tab)
dsnm LtdMay 2024
AI in the Superyacht Industry
Interview on where AI is taking the industry, alongside The Yacht Videographer and dsnm.
Read the article (opens in a new tab)
Dockwalk
Former Superyacht Bosun Launches CrewPass to Protect Yacht Crew
The CrewPass launch story.
Read the article (opens in a new tab)
Superyacht Content
Conrad Empson: From Below Deck to CEO of CrewPass
Founder interview: the road from deck crew to running a compliance platform.
Read the article (opens in a new tab)
wilsonhalligan
Liam Meets Conrad from CrewPass
Founder interview with the yacht crew recruitment specialists.
Read the article (opens in a new tab)
Bring me the workflow that eats your week
Twenty minutes, free, direct with me. I will ask the right questions and tell you honestly whether it is worth fixing. Prefer to start by email? I reply within 24 hours.