Hollie Whittles

Hollie Whittles is HR and information security director of Purple Frog Systems, the Shropshire-based Microsoft data and AI consultancy she co-founded with her husband, chief executive Alex Whittles. The company was incorporated in January 2006. She belongs among rising leaders because of the national role she has built on the question every AI-selling partner now faces: whether small businesses have the skills to use what they are sold.

Skills policy, then an MBE

Whittles is national skills policy champion for the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). Purple Frog says that in the role she has contributed to discussions on AI skills, apprenticeship standards, curriculum reform and workforce development, and most recently to the Maple Review, which set out recommendations to remove barriers to entrepreneurship. In June 2026 she was appointed MBE in the King’s Honours List for services to business, female entrepreneurship and skills.

After a Downing Street reception on AI in February 2026, she set out her position in a post on Purple Frog’s site: “AI innovation must not be something done to small businesses; it must be something built with them.” She pointed small firms to the government’s free AI Skills Boost training and argued that training should be treated as a growth strategy, not a cost.

A seat at the channel’s table

In the channel, Whittles is vice chair of GTIA’s UK and Ireland executive council, a role she continued into 2026, and she helped shape the association’s Data and AI Guidebook for IT service providers, published in late 2025. She won GTIA’s UK and Ireland Community Leadership award in 2025. In July 2026 GTIA named Purple Frog the UK and Ireland IT service provider of the year, and Whittles collected the award.

Why it matters to the channel

Many MSPs and consultancies now sell AI services, and those sales depend on customers who can use the tools. Whittles works on that demand side of the problem, in government skills policy as well as in the channel’s own member body. Her influence reaches well beyond a single consultancy.

Whittles has carried the small-business skills case from a Shropshire consultancy to Downing Street, the FSB and GTIA’s UK and Ireland council.