Innovating for the “Customer of the Future” – Dave Hodson x XTech

What does meaningful transformation really look like?

For Dave Hodsdon, VP of Transformation at Liberty Blume, it’s not about tech for tech’s sake. It’s about execution, listening to users, and building practical, people-first solutions that scale.

In an XTech podcast with Debbie Forster, MBE, Hodsdon shared how Liberty Blume is approaching transformation differently — driven by empathy, agility, and action.

Here’s a look at three key takeaways from their discussion.

Just get started

With a career dedicated to leading large-scale change across complex organizations, Hodsdon has seen firsthand how intimidating transformation can feel at the outset. Many enterprises are paralysed by decades of legacy data and the belief that everything must be fixed before progress can begin.

“I spend a lot of time talking to people that are starting their transformation journey or feeling like they’re being left behind by this tidal wave of technical innovation. Don’t know where to start. They’ve been told, get your data right first, focus on good data inputs,” he said.

“I wish we’d just started earlier,” he reflected. Liberty Blume began its automation journey back in 2018, learning through robotics and workflow digitisation what really mattered. That experience helped the company plan better, execute faster, and apply lessons to new technologies like conversational AI.

His advice to other businesses is clear: don’t wait for perfect conditions. “Just get on with it,” Hodsdon said. “You’ll learn more in the first six weeks than you could in years of planning.”

Be the disruptor

Hodsdon positioned Liberty Blume as a challenger brand in a crowded industry dominated by long-established players.

“What we’re not going to do is go toe-to-toe with these providers and try and play the s

ame game that they’ve played very successfully over the last 25 years. We’re planning for the customer of the future and we’ll be a business solutions provider of the future. And the way that we will do that is by delivering tech-led services to our customers,” he said.

That means embedding cutting-edge technology into every service the company delivers, from partnering with hyperscalers to working with niche startups.

Above all, it’s about showing measurable impact: “The accounting professionals in this world, the CFOs of this world, want to see this technology add material value, usually monetary value, to a business. The lawyers want to be able to process more quickly, do their legal research more quickly. And so it’s all been about, ‘Bring it to life for me. How will this help me?’”

Build practical AI applications beyond the hype

Liberty Blume’s strategy centres on embedding technology throughout its service delivery model, especially in the ecosystem of 40 to 60 solutions that connect to ERP systems like Oracle and SAP.

“All of that infrastructure is ripe for disruption,” Hodsdon said. Current use cases include:

• Audit reporting: Cutting iterations with AI support
• Legal drafting: Accelerating contract negotiations with AI-generated clauses
• Accounting policy memos: Significantly reducing drafting time by 6 to 12 hours

While Hodsdon said the generative AI market is in a “trough of disillusionment,” he’s optimistic about what’s next.

He predicted 2026 will be a breakthrough year for agentic AI — automated systems capable of handling complex, repeatable decisions with minimal human oversight.

Listen to the full podcast