About Michael Guthrie
28 years across the stack, the systems, and the strategy.
Digital since the mid-1990s. Enterprise CMS architect. GTM engineer. AI orchestrator. I’ve spent three decades building the infrastructure behind organisations that can’t afford to stop.
The story
A career spent making complex digital projects land.
I started in digital in the mid-1990s, pioneering early internet advertising in New York before co-founding a design and build agency whose clients included American Express and Condé Nast. Since then the through-line has been the same: taking ambitious digital projects and making them real.
From there I moved into enterprise content management — building repository platforms, migrating institutional archives, and designing the knowledge infrastructure that academic and government organisations depend on. The WHO IRIS project (1M+ records) was the largest of these, but the pattern repeated across KnowledgeArc, the Royal Navy’s Sea Your History archive, and BDF.
Over the past five years I’ve layered in the growth side — GTM engineering, outbound infrastructure, and now AI orchestration. The common thread is systems thinking: understanding how the whole thing fits together before touching a single piece of it.
I’m based in Brighton, UK. I work remotely and on-site with teams across Europe and North America.
What I do
Four practice areas, one systems mindset.
01
GTM Engineering
Multi-inbox outbound systems, sequence architecture, deliverability, and personalisation at scale.
02
AI Orchestration
Claude Code, MCP agents, and GPT-4 workflows wired into real ops — lead research, content ops, internal tooling.
03
CMS Architecture
WordPress and headless builds — migration strategy, editorial workflow design, platform governance.
04
Knowledge Systems
Institutional repositories, metadata schema, and knowledge management platforms built for discoverability.
How I operate
A few things I believe strongly.
- 01Context beats process. I learn how your team operates before proposing changes. The best system is the one your team will actually run.
- 02Shipping beats planning. Discovery phases that bill at day rate without producing anything are a tax. I’d rather ship a working v1 in week two than a roadmap in week four.
- 03Clean exits are the goal. My job is to make myself unnecessary. Everything I build gets documented, trained on, and handed over — no black-box systems, no vendor lock-in.
- 04Boring infrastructure is good infrastructure. The exciting technology is in the layer above the platform. The platform should be dull, stable, and maintainable at 2am.
Ready to work together?
Q3 2026 capacity is available. Book a call to discuss your project.