Charterhouse appoints leading AI experts Professor Neil Lawrence and Mehdi Ghissassi as Senior Advisers to work closely with Charterhouse’s value creation team to further enhance the use of AI across the firm and its portfolio companies

September 29, 2026

Charterhouse Capital Partners (“Charterhouse”), one of the longest established private equity firms operating in Europe, today announces the appointments of Professor Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, and Mehdi Ghissassi, Chief Product & Technology Officer at AI71 and a former senior leader at DeepMind and Google Brain, as Senior Advisers. 
The appointments will reinforce Charterhouse’s ability to identify and harness opportunities presented by AI across its portfolio, helping to drive operational improvement, accelerate growth and create long-term value. Neil and Mehdi will work closely with Charterhouse’s investment and portfolio teams to advance the firm’s AI strategy, identify practical applications of the technology and continue to embed AI effectively across the portfolio.

Professor Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge and one of the world’s leading authorities on artificial intelligence. He leads ai@cam, the University of Cambridge’s flagship AI mission, and is the author of The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI, which examines the relationship between human and machine intelligence.
Prior to returning to academia, Neil served as Director of Machine Learning at Amazon from 2016 to 2019, where he led machine learning science across the company and helped deploy ML solutions across Alexa, Prime Air, AWS and Amazon’s global supply chain. He has also advised organisations including GlaxoSmithKline and Cambridge Innovation Capital on the adoption and application of AI.
Mehdi Ghissassi is Chief Product & Technology Officer at AI71, where he has built and leads the company’s product and engineering functions, overseeing a team of more than 100 people developing and deploying AI products. He also serves as an independent board member at TP, formerly Teleperformance, where he chairs the AI & Innovation Committee, and at Saham Bank, where he chairs the AI and Technology Committee.

Previously, Mehdi spent more than a decade at Google, including senior roles at DeepMind and Google Brain. As Product Management Director, he was responsible for turning DeepMind’s research breakthroughs into products reaching billions of users. Earlier, as Head of Product Incubation & Strategic Partnerships, he helped advance DeepMind’s work in healthcare and originated its move into the applications of drug discovery, which led to the spin-out of Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet’s AI-first drug design and discovery company.

Alison Rose, Senior Partner at Charterhouse Capital Partners, said: “Working closely with management teams to help their companies grow and create value has always been central to our approach. AI is becoming an increasingly important part of that, creating opportunities across our portfolio to improve how businesses operate, innovate and grow. Neil and Mehdi bring exceptional and complementary expertise spanning both the development of AI and its practical application. Their experience will add another dimension to the capabilities we bring to our portfolio, and we are delighted to welcome them to Charterhouse.”

Professor Neil Lawrence said: “The opportunity presented by AI is not simply about adopting increasingly powerful technology but understanding where it can make organisations and the people within them more effective. The businesses that benefit most will be those that combine these new capabilities with human judgement and expertise. I look forward to working with Charterhouse and its portfolio companies to identify where AI can have the greatest practical impact."

Mehdi Ghissassi added: “We are entering an exciting phase for AI, as advances in the technology create new possibilities for how businesses build products, serve their customers and operate at scale. I’ve spent much of my career turning breakthrough technologies into products with real-world impact, and I’m excited to bring that experience to Charterhouse and help its portfolio companies translate the potential of AI into tangible business outcomes.”