As Birmingham Tech Week brings the city’s technology ambitions into focus, Sunny Vara believes the most important conversations concern people, opportunity and trust. CARL JONES meets the award-winning entrepreneur whose international career brought him back to Birmingham with a determination to help others move forward.
A robotic dog is an effective way of getting a conversation started.
On the shiny floor of an upper storey of Millennium Point, the small machine is being put through its paces. It can navigate its surroundings, avoid obstacles and reach places that might be difficult or unsafe for a person to enter.
The possibilities are easy to imagine. An inspection carried out differently, a hazardous task made safer, or perhaps a new way of supporting people at work.
Sunny Vara shares that interest. He is also concerned with the questions that a demonstration cannot answer.
Who controls the machine? Where does the information it collects go? What happens if someone interferes with its software?
“The biggest question with AI isn’t what it can achieve,” he says. “It’s whether we can trust it to do the right thing, with the right data, within the boundaries we’ve set.”
The subject is technology, but Vara’s attention keeps returning to people: those making the decisions, those relying on them and those who may be affected without ever understanding how a system works.
It is a thread running through a career that has taken him from Birmingham City University to London and international consultancy, and eventually back to Birmingham to establish Cybercy Group. Only this year he was included in the CIO 100 Awards, so it’s been quite a journey.
His ambitions now include bringing more people into that conversation, particularly in the region where he grew up.
His phrase for the approach is “winning together”.
It helps explain why a discussion about autonomous machines soon becomes a conversation about local talent, professional relationships and the opportunities available to young people.
Vara grew up in Solihull. He is of Indian heritage, with a Ugandan mother and a Kenyan father, and a family background spanning East Africa.
He is married to Kam and is the proud father of a 13-year-old daughter. Questions about the technology that will shape working life therefore have a significance beyond his professional interests. They also concern the world his daughter’s generation will inherit.
His own interest in privacy and security began with personal experience. He was a victim of identity fraud at an early age, an encounter that helped him understand how the misuse of information can affect someone’s life.
He has since turned that experience into a business helping individuals, their families and organisations of all sizes around the world.
The experience was a starting point. What followed was a career spent examining how organisations use information, manage risk and decide whom to trust.
Before establishing his own business, Vara spent four years in London working for an established management consultancy. His wider career included work with banks, central and local government, and private-sector organisations, with assignments taking him around the world.
Those experiences introduced him to different organisational cultures, resources and expectations. They also helped him build networks across Europe, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
In 2017, he brought that accumulated knowledge and experience back to Birmingham and founded Cybercy Group.
The decision gave his international career a local base. The city where he had studied became the place from which he would build a business with a much wider reach.
Today, he supports clients with cybersecurity and AI in the UK and markets including India, Australia, Africa, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
That geographical breadth informs his perspective, but the relationships within it matter just as much. Experience of another market can introduce a different approach to a problem. Knowing whom to ask can make it possible to explore an idea, find expertise or avoid repeating somebody else’s mistake.
Closer to home, he has built strong connections with other technology leaders in Birmingham. His ambition is to bring that experience and those relationships into useful contact with the region’s emerging talent.
There is already a practical expression of that commitment.
Vara has taken on talent from Birmingham’s schools, colleges and universities, developing a local academy approach that pairs students and emerging professionals with experienced consultants.
The intention is to connect learning with the realities of professional work. Technical knowledge matters, but so does learning how to ask a useful question, explain a finding and recognise when more evidence is needed.
One example is Arun, who joined from Aston University. His route forms part of a wider effort to give local talent access to experienced people and a clearer understanding of where their abilities could take them.
For Vara, the relationship works in both directions. Those starting out gain guidance and professional context; experienced colleagues encounter fresh questions and perspectives.
“I have benefited from experience and relationships built over many years,” he says. “I want to use those connections to help others move forward. If we can bring local talent, experienced leaders and businesses together, there is much more we can achieve.”
His Solihull upbringing and Birmingham education give that ambition a personal foundation. He wants young people across the area to have opportunities to build careers with an international reach while retaining a connection to home.
Schools, colleges and universities provide a starting point. Bringing their students into contact with employers and experienced professionals can help turn potential into a practical route into work.
For someone whose own career took him far beyond the region, sharing what he has learned is one way of contributing to its future.
It also reveals something about his approach to leadership. The emphasis is on recognising what different people can contribute and creating opportunities for them to do so.
That matters in a field where no single discipline has all the answers.
Vara’s early work centred on privacy and security. Over time, the circumstances in which those disciplines operate have changed considerably.
The pandemic moved work into homes, made cloud platforms essential and blurred the boundaries between personal and corporate technology. AI is now introducing another shift, as tools that help people produce answers become systems capable of taking action.
“AI can make organisations dramatically more efficient,” he says. “I’m a huge advocate for it. But speed of adoption cannot be the only measure of success. Businesses need to understand what they are deploying, what data it touches and what happens when it behaves in a way they didn’t expect.”
An assistant that drafts an email leaves somebody to decide whether it should be sent. Give an agent permission to send the message, update a customer record and initiate another process, and its responsibilities change.
Each permission may appear reasonable when considered separately. Together, they give the technology influence over a relationship that people may have spent years building.
For Vara, this is where cybersecurity becomes part of the business decision about AI.
His work extends beyond assessment and advice. Through Cybercy Group, he also helps organisations implement tailored cybersecurity and AI solutions, connecting the recommendations made to leaders with the systems their people will use.
That requires understanding how an organisation operates: its existing technology, the information it handles and the people who depend on it. The implementation needs to fit those circumstances, with security and accountability considered alongside the intended business benefit.
An organisation needs to understand what information a system can access, whose authority it operates under and which actions it is allowed to take. It also needs a way to examine its activity and intervene.
“Every permission we give an AI system is a business decision,” he says. “If it can read sensitive information, change a record or act on someone’s behalf, security has to be part of the design from the beginning.”
The change can happen gradually. Someone discovers a useful application. A team finds further uses. What began as a convenience becomes part of the working day, sometimes before anyone has considered the full implications.
For a smaller business, assessing those implications may fall to someone already carrying several responsibilities. A larger organisation may have more specialists but also more suppliers, systems and departments to coordinate.
Both need clarity about what they have authorised and who remains accountable.
For Vara, trusted advice and practical delivery belong together. Understanding the purpose of an implementation, the pressures on the organisation and the limits of the available evidence helps turn an informed decision into a solution that fits the way people work.
“Being trusted means being prepared to have the difficult conversation,” he says. “Sometimes that means challenging an assumption or saying we need more evidence. My responsibility is to help a customer make a decision they can stand behind.”
There is a practical set of values in that description: honesty about uncertainty, willingness to challenge and accountability for advice.
Those qualities become particularly important when an organisation is enthusiastic about a new tool, under pressure to keep pace with competitors or looking for reassurance about an investment.
Confidence is useful only if it has a sound basis.
His experience includes cybersecurity and AI maturity assessments across central and local government, where the challenge extends beyond identifying technical weaknesses.
Leaders need to understand what the findings mean for the services people depend on, which improvements deserve priority and who should take responsibility for delivering them.
For Vara, an assessment needs to provide a basis for action. Examining security controls, information handling, accountability and readiness for AI establishes the starting position. The next task is to turn those findings into a practical programme of improvement.
Depending on the organisation, that could involve strengthening oversight of suppliers, clarifying access to sensitive information or establishing the conditions under which an AI application can be introduced responsibly.
Cybersecurity and AI maturity need to be considered together. A promising application still depends on sound information management, appropriate permissions and people who understand their responsibilities.
The outcome being sought is a clearer basis for decisions: leaders able to distinguish urgent weaknesses from longer-term priorities, assign ownership and assess whether the organisation is becoming better prepared.
That is how an assessment can help an organisation move from understanding a problem to addressing it. Its value becomes evident in the changes that follow, including how recommendations are implemented and how those changes are sustained.
“The organisations that get this right won’t necessarily be the ones that use the most AI,” Vara says. “They’ll be the ones that can use it confidently because they understand it and remain in control.”
He describes the wider challenge as ‘The Trust Game’.
The phrase brings the discussion back to what a customer is trying to achieve. Introducing AI is a means to an end: perhaps reducing repetitive work, improving a service or giving people better information on which to act.
Winning means achieving that benefit while maintaining the confidence of the people affected.
“In The Trust Game, the customer wins when AI delivers something useful and the people affected have good reason to trust it,” he says. “That might be time back for a team, a better service or a more informed decision. We should be clear about the benefit we are trying to achieve.”
That gives the idea a practical test. An organisation should be able to explain the improvement it is seeking, who is responsible and how it will judge whether the change is working.
Security supports that ambition by helping protect the information, access and continuity on which the service depends. The work continues as systems change, new connections are introduced and people discover uses that were not part of the original plan.
The ability to stop, investigate and recover matters alongside performance when everything goes well.
His international experience adds another perspective. Even an organisation operating from a single Birmingham office may depend on technology providers, developers and infrastructure in several countries.
Understanding where information goes and who can access it becomes part of understanding the business itself. A customer’s experience of a service may be straightforward even when the arrangements behind it are complex.
Robotics gives those dependencies a physical form.
At Millennium Point, the machine’s movements are visible. Its software, permissions and connections are less apparent. As autonomous machines enter workplaces, questions about their operation extend to the people and equipment nearby.
Vara is exploring the security and compliance issues surrounding robotics through his work. As machines acquire greater autonomy, the boundaries around their actions become increasingly important.
“The more autonomy we give technology, the more important trust becomes,” he says. “You need to know what it can do, what it can access, what boundaries exist and what happens if somebody compromises it.”
His ambition is for Birmingham to help develop the expertise needed to answer such questions, alongside the capability to build and use the technology itself.
That is where his international experience and commitment to local relationships come together. He wants the region to be recognised for the quality of its work in secure, responsible AI, with opportunities for local people to contribute to it.
Two initiatives he is working on, Birmingham’s AI Foundry and AI Boardroom, reflect that intention.
AI Foundry is envisaged as a place where businesses, technology companies, students and academics can collaborate around practical applications. AI Boardroom is intended to involve decision-makers from professions including finance, law, risk and audit.
Both address a familiar difficulty. The people developing technology, those buying it and those accountable for its consequences do not always begin with the same questions.
A developer wants to understand what can be built. An operational leader needs to know whether it improves the work. A security specialist or lawyer may identify a responsibility that affects how it should be used.
Students and people entering the sector bring their own questions and ideas. Involving them creates opportunities to learn from the work while contributing to it.
For Vara, engaging local talent belongs within the ambition from the outset. A city’s technology future depends on people having a route into shaping it.
“Birmingham was one of the key engines of the Industrial Revolution,” he says. “We have universities, professional services, advanced manufacturing, financial services, technology businesses and an incredibly diverse talent base. There is no reason we should simply watch the AI revolution happen somewhere else.”
The region has established industries with practical problems to solve and people who understand those problems in detail. That gives innovation a useful starting point.
For a manufacturer, an application might concern a particular production process. For a professional-services firm, it might involve handling information more effectively while maintaining a client’s confidence.
The measure of initiatives such as AI Foundry and AI Boardroom will be whether they help turn those problems and connections into useful projects, shared learning and lasting expertise.
For Vara, the next generation has a significance closer to home than a workforce forecast. His daughter will enter a world in which many of today’s emerging technologies are ordinary parts of life.
Helping young people find opportunities within that world sits alongside his concern that the technology should be used responsibly.
His own journey, from growing up in Solihull and studying in Birmingham to working internationally, shows that a career can take someone far beyond the region while strengthening their desire to contribute to its future.
“AI is going to transform businesses, jobs and industries,” he says. “That is incredibly exciting. But adoption at scale depends on trust. I want Cybercy Group to play a part in solving that challenge, and I want Birmingham to be one of the places where the solutions are built.”
The robotic dog is a memorable image of what technology can achieve. Vara’s account of the future is populated by the people around it: business owners, colleagues, students, fellow technology leaders and families.
An international career has given him experience to draw upon. Birmingham is where he wants to help put more of it to work.
“Winning together” is his phrase. The ambition is to give more people a part in what comes next.
