Simon Ummard
I'm a technical lead, solution architect, and hands-on builder focused on practical applications of AI, data, and custom software — currently a technical lead and applied AI architect at BDO Canada. I help organizations make sense of complicated opportunities, turn ideas into working prototypes, and design the path from experiment to dependable production system.
My background spans full-stack development, enterprise data, cloud architecture, knowledge systems, embedded technology, and generative AI. That breadth lets me reason across the complete system — the user, the workflow, the information, the software, the infrastructure, and the organization responsible for it — rather than treating them as separate concerns. I'm most useful when a problem crosses boundaries.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Applied & Generative AI
Assistants and copilots, RAG, document understanding, agents, evaluation, and productionizing AI prototypes.
Rapid Prototyping & Discovery
Using prototypes to help organizations think — surfacing real needs, bad assumptions, and overlooked risk.
Solution Architecture
Application boundaries, cloud, networking, identity, APIs, data, observability, and production ownership.
Custom & Full-Stack Software
Strong backends with an emphasis on usability — software designed around the work, not the other way round.
Data & Knowledge Systems
Enterprise, semantic, and vector search, knowledge graphs, ingestion, and organizational memory.
Facilitation & Translation
Bridging executives, experts, developers, infrastructure, security, and users — without losing the nuance.
WHAT DIFFERENTIATES ME
Breadth without losing depth
Moving between software, data, AI, infrastructure, process, UX, and physical technology surfaces issues single-layer specialists miss.
Builder and translator
I can shape the idea, communicate it to stakeholders, build enough to test it, and design the architecture to deliver it responsibly.
Enterprise awareness without paralysis
I respect security, maintainability, and standards — and know that excessive process stops organizations from learning.
Comfort with ambiguity
I can hold multiple possibilities, find the central problem, and move work toward something concrete without pretending all uncertainty is gone.
TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT
TOOLS I REACH FORCLOUD & ENTERPRISE
DEVELOPMENT
DATA & KNOWLEDGE
AI & AUTOMATION
Technology is most useful when it disappears into the work. The goal isn't to add AI everywhere — it's to find where ambiguity, language, or judgment blocks people, and decide whether AI can help.
Where deterministic software works, we should use it. Where people need help interpreting incomplete information or navigating complex knowledge, AI can be extraordinary. The real craft is knowing how to join the two.
Let's work in the space between "could" and "works."
If that's where your problem lives, I'd like to hear about it.