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Colin Bannon
BT, CTO
Speaker Bio
Colin Bannon is the chief technology officer (CTO) for BT Business and BT International. He’s charged with delivering the product technology strategy and solution designs that enable strategic outcomes for more than one million businesses and government organisations in the UK and internationally.
BT’s customers include world-leading brands, government and financial services organisations, as well as domestic UK small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and public sector organisations, including defence and health. BT also provides wholesale products and services to other telecommunication companies in the UK and internationally.
Colin is the architect of some of the largest customer network transformations in the world, including BT’s own enterprise network. In addition, he is BT Business’ and BT International’s technology lead for partners including hyperscalers, networking equipment vendors and carrier neutral facility (CNF) providers.
Colin set the vision and design of Global Fabric, BT International’s transformative, AI-ready network-as-a-service (NaaS) telco platform. This is a full re-platforming and digitisation of BT’s global network footprint, services and partner integrations for multinational customers. His API-first approach to the platform’s design gives it the ability to connect customers across a full digital ecosystem of cloud and solution providers to create value in the market.
In 2025, Colin spearheaded cyber resilience recovery programmes for several UK and global brands following major cyber-attacks. He is a thought leader in digital sovereignty, contributing to a multi-domain industry response to create a foundational taxonomy and definitions. He sits on the UK government sovereign AI steering board, along with industry and global technology leaders. He is also shaping BT’s platform-based approach to sovereignty aimed at delivering outcomes of stability, security, skills and speed.
Colin is active across the telecommunications industry and academia, holding a seat on Mplify — formerly Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) — and lecturing at Warwick University. In addition to his 20 years at BT Group, including roles such as chief architect, Colin has held engineering leadership and consulting engineer positions at IBM, Lucent INS and Unisys.