When eBay needed a keynote speaker to help thousands of UK sellers understand the strategic potential of AI, they turned to Suzanne Hill - a Holywood-based business strategist whose career has been devoted to helping small and medium-sized companies grow, scale and compete internationally.

At eBay Open 2025, held at Birmingham’s NEC, she stood on a circular stage in front of more than four thousand sellers and hundreds of eBay staff. Her message was simple but provocative: AI isn’t an IT project. It’s a business strategy.

“Every conversation about AI should start with the business objective, not the technology,” she told the audience. “If you don’t know where you’re going, the cleverest tool in the world won’t get you there.”

From global strategy to the AI frontier

Suzanne’s credibility in this field comes not from coding, but from strategy. Over the past 23 years, she has worked with more than 1,000 SMEs across 60 countries, helping them enter new markets, sharpen competitiveness and build international growth strategies.

Originally from Ballyclare, she began her career with Randox, before managing markets across Europe and the Americas for Brett Martin. She later founded her own export consultancy, Handel Export, which guided hundreds of Northern Ireland firms into overseas trade.

Those decades at the intersection of strategy, innovation and global business gave her a front-row view of how technology shapes competitiveness - and why so many smaller companies struggle to keep pace.

“What I saw repeatedly,” she explains, “was that SMEs had the ambition and expertise, but not the framework to use new technology strategically. AI has made that gap impossible to ignore.”

Building AI for SMEs

Determined to bridge that gap, Suzanne completed two diplomas at University College Dublin, in AI for Business and Advanced AI for Business, graduating both with Distinction. She then founded AI for SMEs, a consultancy and training company that helps leadership teams integrate AI.

Her approach is deliberately non-technical. She talks first about culture, capability and competitive advantage before discussing tools or data models. For many clients in construction and professional services, that reframing is transformative.

“In any AI initiative, technology is only about 20 per cent of the story,” Suzanne says. “The other 80 per cent is strategy, people and data”.

A strategic voice in a noisy space

Suzanne’s perspective cuts through a crowded field of self-proclaimed AI experts. Where others focus on the technology, she concentrates on governance, workforce readiness and long-term transformation. “One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is focusing on the AI technology, without undertaking the organizational transformation to support the technology. This is important because there is a short window of opportunity where technology can give a company a competitive advantage, but say in another two years when everyone has access to the technology, where is your competitive advantage? You build competitive advantage through your people, processes and data, not through the AI tools themselves”.

Through her proprietary Constructive Intelligence™ framework, she helps companies assess readiness, manage risk and embed AI responsibly, turning early adoption into a source of competitive advantage rather than chaos.

“The AI conversation has become noisy,” she says. “Businesses need clarity, they need to know where to start, how to scale safely and how to keep their people on board.”

Lessons from the eBay stage

Back in Birmingham, Suzanne’s keynote - “Small Business, Big Advantage: Using AI to Scale Smarter”, struck a chord. In conversations with sellers afterwards, they shared their own experiences and fears about automation, productivity and change.

For Suzanne, that response confirmed her central belief: that AI can level the playing field for smaller firms, giving them access to insights, efficiency and global reach once reserved for major corporations.

“The next wave of competitiveness will come from how intelligently small businesses use AI,” she says. “Those who approach it strategically will grow faster, attract better talent and deliver more value to customers.”

Beyond the buzzwords

Suzanne argues that the real challenge for business leaders is mindset. Too many still see AI as a technical exercise rather than an organisational evolution.

Her workshops encourage executives to map processes, identify friction points and view AI as a means of enabling strategy, not replacing people.

She often uses a simple analogy: “Think of AI as the car, not the driver. You still choose the destination, the route and the pace. The technology simply gets you there more efficiently.”

It’s an approach that resonates with leadership teams who are time-poor, cautious about disruption and wary of hype. By removing the fear factor, she’s helping companies make pragmatic first steps, from productivity tools to responsible governance frameworks.

Looking ahead

As AI continues to reshape every sector, Suzanne wants Northern Ireland’s businesses to be early beneficiaries, not late adopters.

“We’ve always punched above our weight,” she says. “If our SMEs combine their ingenuity with the intelligent use of AI, there’s no reason we can’t lead internationally again.”

From Holywood to the global stage, Suzanne Hill’s work is a reminder that technology alone doesn’t build competitive advantage, people and strategy do

If your organisation is looking for a keynote speaker, guest lecturer, or panel contributor on AI in construction, leadership, and workforce transformation, you can find more information on my speaking work here.

I regularly speak to executive teams, industry conferences, and academic programmes on how AI is reshaping industries - not just technically, but commercially, strategically, and culturally.