Ground Control CIO Chris Howell re-thinks quoting to drive growth and cut carbon

A unique business model for the grounds management sector, B Corp membership, ecologically minded founders, and rapid growth mean being CIO of Ground Control requires curiosity, leadership, innovation, and a shared belief in the firm’s goals. Chris Howell sat down with diginomica to describe meeting these interconnected needs in the UK firm.

Ground Control provides the management of external facilities, as well as biodiversity services for organizations such as Network Rail, retail, and utilities companies. Typically, these customers need ground maintenance, landscaping, or more specialist work such as the installation of EV charging points, drone surveys of species, and arboriculture. The uniqueness of the Ground Control business model is that many of the teams that carry out this vital work will be local small and medium-sized businesses, CIO Howell adds:

Our field team model is our USP; we provide the security and assurance, as a broker in the middle for large tier one organizations that want to engage with local entrepreneurs.

Typically, it is prohibitive for small specialists to get the levels of public liability and employee insurance that a tier one business requires. In addition, the procurement practices of large firms mean they are not going to discover those local experts. Howell says:

We provide a wrapper for that gap. People are surprised by the compliance overhead of this type of work. It has similarities with the marketplace model, we know all of the operatives really well so there is more to it than a classic sub-contractor model.

The 52-year-old company is already carbon-neutral and commits five percent of its profits to a venture fund that is focused on environmental and carbon sequestration projects. Ground Control has invested in and developed a habitat bank in Cambridgeshire, which is providing the environment for pollinators, birds, bats, reptiles, and mammals. Howell describes Chairman Simon Morrish as a technologist and an environmentalist:

He’s impatient for the future, and in some respects quite concerned.

Ground Control is a B Corp, as Howell described to us in 2024, which the CIO says ensures you are always making good ethical decisions. Those decisions don’t inhibit business growth.

One such decision was the development of the Intelligent Quoting App, bringing a consumer App experience to business-to-business procurement. Ground Control’s core role is to provide all the elements of ground maintenance that the customer doesn’t see, such as the insurance, the safety, and the human resources checks. Typically in the business world, this is described as the part of the iceberg that is invisible, but as a company that tends trees and plants, Ground Control prefers to call it below ground. The field teams operate above the ground, coming to your business to grit a car park, install EV chargers, or prune a tree.

As a business that is actively reducing its carbon footprint, but is also nationwide there is a demand to be on the road. Howell says:

Even with an electric fleet, there is a lot of traveling.

Increasingly, customers are used to a consumer experience of going online for a price and a date for something to take place. Amazon has created a one-click expectation. Howell and his team took this thinking and created the Intelligent Quoting App that allows its customers to get a “reasonably accurate quote,” and a schedule for the work to be carried out, all without Ground Control having to ask its teams to make a journey.

The type of work Ground Control specializes in requires a specific risk assessment. A basic level of risk assessment can be carried out using pictures that have been uploaded to the App. The Intelligent Quoting App reduces fuel usage, stress for employees from traveling, and delivers a faster service to the customer.

A RAG Large Language Model (LLM) ensures the App can deliver a price, while a human in the loop will validate the risk assessment. Howell adds:

It joins up a client need with an organizational need and a societal need. In one case, a retail business entered their needs, and it saved a 360-mile site visit to the south west of England, which is an area that is often hard to resource, and that saved 11 kilos of carbon emissions. The customer is getting a same-day price to consider.

At present, the App supports predictable jobs that are low risk, but the savings and convenience is there, leaving more time and energy for the tricky roles that may have a higher risk profile. Operational managers at Ground Control who are using the App no longer have to upload notes and images to a separate system, and 30 Ground Control clients are using it. Howell says of early results:

It has sped up processes, improved the quality and consistency of data capture, and that will then improve the next generation of pricing and sourcing.

Ground Control built the App using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, with some additional Python. Development was carried out by Foil, a specialist App development house. The App went on to be recognized at the British Data Awards 2025

Growing growth

Howell joined the business to respond to its ambitious growth and ensure the business continued to grow. He adds:

The mission, when I joined, was to enable the business to double in size. As you approach a turnover of £200 million, there is a step change, and it is important to simplify the work, connect the processes, and unlock the data for decision-making so that you can increase the bottom line. Prior to the pandemic, Ground Control had been acquisitive. Along with the impact of COVID meant that when Howell arrived, there was a need to address some technology risks, and to optimize the technology estate and business processes.

As ever, that meant not only modernizing the technologies, but also the culture of the technology operations. One of the challenges with this for a small team in a growing mid-sized business is the need to context shift. Howell says Reid Hoffman’s Blitz Scaling book has shaped his thinking and his leadership style during the transformation of Ground Control. He says:

One of the hardest bits for me, and my role has been to process that you work tremendously hard with a group of people for two to three years, and then you hit another phase of change, and you have different needs. There is an emotional overhead as you do the right thing for the organization.

He describes transformation as having two halves that CIOs must navigate. The first half is about doing transformation to people; this is the heavy lifting of implementing infrastructure and a new ERP, for example. The second phase then involves everyone coming together, he says, and delivering the business model and customer service benefits. Howell enjoys working in mid-sized businesses, as it enables a CIO to be both strategic and to get involved in the actual building of new services and processes. He says:

I love tinkering and have been doing some data analysis, prompt engineering, and writing some SQL. It is one of the reasons I enjoy the scale-up of a medium-sized to a large organization.

I have a team of 55 people, and I can sit down with any of them and chat with them about what they are doing, as I have done a bit of it.

As Ground Control, like all businesses, considers how AI can and will be used, Howell has created an internal AI Early Adopter forum. He says:

Our job as CIOs is to put the information into the hands of our people, but the satisfaction and the payoff is solving a problem and enabling someone to use data, insight, or a new tool, and that is the dopamine hit for me. When we solve a problem.

Ground Control identified who in its staff would be early adopters, and asked them to apply to the AI programme. The successful applicants were given a Copilot licence and set up a weekly chat with this cohort. They began to share prompts and insights. He likens it to a family or a community, as AI spread throughout the organization, this group of early adopters became the experts that others would turn to for advice on the best way to use AI. One member, who is on their second career, having retrained in IT from hospitality, is now working with the board to ensure they understand and use AI effectively.

That is the power of community, and the human element of what we do is becoming even more important.

My take

Digital transformation, whether using AI or not, has always been about re-thinking business processes and doing them in an entirely new way. Howell and Ground Control have done this with their Intelligent Quoting App, and in doing so, not only improved their business but also reduced the emissions of the business. That is the power of technology and of transformation. More businesses need to think this way.