Who We Are
Built by practitioners, for leaders.
Foremost is led by five partners with complementary expertise spanning strategy, technology, applied AI, and organisational transformation. Backgrounds include MIT, Amazon, AWS, Microsoft, Deloitte, and EY: practitioners who have led AI strategy, technology, and transformation at scale.
Our story
Why we founded Foremost.
We saw boards and leadership teams wanting to act on AI, but overwhelmed by the pressure to move fast. The result is fragmented pilots that generate superficial activity rather than real business value. What they lacked was a partner who would sit in the conversation with them, help them think it through, and finally move it past talk.
Fast-moving initiatives stall on the organisational and human side. Technology alone doesn’t transform organisations. People do. It became clear that boards and leadership teams are the key to harnessing AI’s potential, but they need a partner to help them deal honestly with the fears, uncertainties, and politics that decide whether a programme succeeds.
We help boards and leadership teams build organisational capability to harness AI’s potential.
Team
Rigorous thinking, practical execution.
Vitalij Farafonov
Partner & CEO[email protected]
Vitalij spent twenty-five years in operational leadership (Board, NED, CFO, and COO) roles across companies of every size. In early 2025 he made a deliberate pivot: MIT’s AI for Senior Executives programme, then full-time into AI advisory. He now works with organisations from multinationals to growth-stage firms, connecting strategic direction with hands-on delivery of AI tools that earn their place on the P&L.
“There is no standalone AI strategy. There are only business strategies, and the question is how well they are served by AI.”
Dean Davey
Partner[email protected]
A former corporate advisor at Deloitte and EY turned entrepreneur. Dean has advised leading AI labs on talent strategy and traditional enterprises on technology adoption from a people-first perspective. He brings deep expertise in organisational change, leadership coaching, and building teams that perform under pressure, with a focus on the culture and development work that makes transformation stick.
“Adoption is a leadership and organisational question before it becomes a technology question.”
Oscar Gavin
Partner & CTO[email protected]
Oscar is an AI practitioner and full-stack developer with depth across classical and modern AI approaches. He specialises in LLM-powered applications and agentic systems, particularly reasoning and memory architectures. He holds a BSc in AI and Computer Science from Sheffield and an MSc in AI from St Andrews, with a track record of shipping production AI solutions for UK and European businesses.
“A prototype earns attention only when it tests a real operating assumption and produces evidence for the next decision.”
Alex Sinner
Partner & COO[email protected]
Alex is a 17 year Amazon veteran and founding technical architect for AWS in the BeNeLux. He operated at the intersection of cloud-native infrastructure, AI-driven innovation, and regulated enterprise environments. He is known for bringing clarity inside complex, high-stakes settings, establishing governance, engineering discipline, and delivery velocity.
“Good governance should make sound decisions faster by clarifying ownership, evidence, and acceptable risk.”
Larry Ockene
Partner & Adviser[email protected]
Larry led software engineering and product organisations for over forty years, the last thirty split between Amazon and Microsoft. He has guided innovation from conception through delivery across enterprise systems, web and mobile, voice and graphical interfaces, platform APIs, and developer tools. He now advises companies on technology strategy, product direction, and strengthening the collaboration between business, product, and engineering.
“Technology strategy works when business, product, and engineering share the same problem definition and measures of progress.”
Working with us
We work with a small number of clients at any given time. This is intentional.
Deep partnerships require sustained attention, real trust, and a thorough understanding of your business.