Engineering × AI × Creative product thinking. Building things that bridge disciplines and solve real problems with taste. MSc Applied AI, Cranfield · Technical Officer, Leveret AI.
Selected work
2025–Present
AI upskilling and workflow automation across finance, construction, charity and public sector. Work has included AI workflows and dashboards for a specialist lender broker (Claude skills: capture-split-context, digitise-phone-notes, draft-credit-paper), a construction company (tender packs, CIS tax), a wealth management firm (trade reconciliation, investor letters), and trusts across the West Midlands (grant writing, board reporting).
Birmingham City Council · West Midlands Trusts
2025
Freelance engineering build. Scraping and data pipeline project for a fitness data client.
Delivered to spec
2026
Freelance AI product build for a client in the food/hospitality space.
Client delivery
2025
Client website and digital presence for a private dining experience brand.
Live client site
2026
Custom AI-powered interview prep and command centre tool built for a client.
Client delivery
2026
Custom face-recognition powered birthday gallery, a one-off client commission.
Delivered
In progress
In Progress
AI assistant for pastoral/clergy workflows. Currently in progress. Another developer built the initial POC, I'm expanding and will blog about the collaboration.
In progress · collaborating
2022–Present
Ongoing freelance web builds and social/digital consulting for small businesses and brands. Clients include Gloteem and others.
Multiple live sites
2026
Led a 3-session AI training programme for the British Textile Machinery Association. Session 1: brand voice and marketing AI (Marlow case study). Session 2: AI ethics and customer support agents. Session 3: multi-source email agents and live Google Sheet automation.
3 sessions delivered
2024–Present
Technical Officer at Leveret, a startup focused on pitching for funding and building early-stage AI product.
Ongoing role
2026
A personal project exploring culture, aesthetics and creative thinking. Sits between tech and art. Also in the artisting hat.
Live
2026
Personal AI health coaching tool merged with a half-marathon training tracker, built using GPT Codex. Integrated workout scheduling, nutrition logging, and coaching feedback.
Personal tool, ongoing
2026
Tool for automatically ordering and curating birthday slideshow photos, built as a thinking/organising project.
Shipped
2025
Telegram bot that tracks gym visits and maintains streak data, a daily accountability system built for personal use.
Active personal tool
Concept
2025
Exploration project: mapping Instagram location data to Google Maps to surface geo-tagged content patterns.
Concept
In progress
2025
Personal physiotherapy tracking and exercise prescription app, in progress.
In progress
Concept
2025
Concept for face detection using Meta smart glasses. Someone else already built a proof-of-concept version. I'll link to it and blog about it.
POC exists externally
In progress
2025–Present
Retrieval-augmented generation pipeline for YouTube content. Index videos and query their content semantically.
In progress
idea
2025
An app that tracks what percentage of a city or area you've physically explored, gamifying urban exploration.
Idea stage
idea
2025
An app that surfaces Spotify listening history as personal memory. "You were listening to this when..."
Idea stage
Concept
Concept
A cooking companion app concept: meal planning, recipe surfacing, and cooking assistant.
Concept / early stage
2026
Auto-generates lyric videos from songs. Syncs lyrics to audio and exports as video.
Shipped
2026
A writing sync tool that aligns creative writing and productivity in one workspace.
Shipped
2024
Matches your current Spotify listening mood to an outfit recommendation, API-driven.
Shipped
In progress
In Progress
Extracts and generates flashcard-style content from GPT conversations, learning from your own AI chats.
In progress
2024–Present
Built an mp3 player and custom animations for the Timikeys project site. Interactive music and motion design.
Live
2025
Demo site for A3 Tutoring, a clean, animated landing page for a tutoring service.
Live
2025
Digital wedding programme, custom design and interactive flow for a wedding.
Live
2026
Cultural and aesthetic exploration project, part thinking, part artistry. A creative platform.
Live
Ongoing
I make images. Using Midjourney and other AI tools to explore visual ideas, moods and concepts.
Ongoing practice
2023–2025
A collaborative zine exploring film and cinema culture, published in Now&Again magazine in Singapore.
Published in Now&Again (Singapore)
Software & AI
2024–2025
MSc dissertation project. Real-time Lidar data visualisation dashboard with behavioural nudging for AV systems. Built at Cranfield.
Distinction · Live
2024–2025
Full suite of MSc module projects: Machine Learning (6 modules), Deep RL agent, CV with CIFAR-10, Geospatial pipeline, RAG sales system. All Cranfield University work.
MSc · Distinction
2024–2025
Group Design Project at Cranfield. Built a generative AI prompt pipeline for engineering design assistance.
Group project · Cranfield
2025
Inventory and stock management system for small retailers, a full-stack web app.
Live
2024
Tool that automatically sorts and orders a batch of photos intelligently, saving hours of manual curation.
Shipped
In progress
In Progress
Computer vision project, segmenting gym equipment and poses from images for workout analysis.
In progress
In progress
In Progress
Automated clothing detection and classification from images using computer vision.
In progress
Concept
Concept
Computer vision concept for detecting purchase intent or product interaction in retail environments.
Concept
Feb 2025
Hackathon project built around Bundesliga data, analysis and visualisation under time pressure.
Hackathon
Mechanical & Physical Design
2021
Designed a smart speaker for fitness environments. Full industrial design process in SolidWorks and KeyShot rendering.
Product Design
2021
Arduino-powered smart cot system, sensors and automated responses for infant sleep monitoring.
Mechatronics
2021
Mechanical gear shift mechanism, designed and prototyped as part of mechanical engineering coursework.
Mechanical Design
2021
Engineering dissertation on electric scooter design, powertrain optimisation and urban mobility.
First-class dissertation
Ongoing
I regularly 3D print custom items: continuity camera mount for MacBook & phone, custom phone cases, kitchen handles and more.
Ongoing · personal & practical
2019
Project experience with Navya autonomous vehicles. Engineering involvement in AV systems and testing.
AV Engineering
2020
Knock-activated lighting system, a mechatronics project using vibration sensing to trigger light responses.
Mechatronics
2016
Engineering project at Imperial College, early systems/design work.
Imperial College
2022–Present
Built and grew the MagKits brand: video editing, working with influencers, and building a social following of 500k+.
500k+ reach
2022–Present
Digital marketing and web presence consulting for small businesses and brands. Examples include Gloteem, event brands and others.
Multiple clients
2024–Present
Worked at Santander HQ. Event operations including QR code registration systems and digital event infrastructure.
Santander HQ
2019–2020
Prepared and pitched GNSS technology projects at LiviaSoft, bridging engineering and commercial stakeholders.
Pitch & BD
2024–Present
Business development and funding pitch work at Leveret AI, positioning the product and pitching for investment.
Funding pitch
2025–Present
Public-facing AI training and upskilling programmes through Avalon Insights.
Enterprise training
Built with AI
Designed and built in a single session with Claude Code. Layout, dot-matrix nav animations, content, all from a PDF brief.
PDF extraction pipeline and LLM retrieval system for a sales team. Claude for architecture planning, GPT for the retrieval layer.
LLM-generated narrative descriptions for satellite imagery datasets, enabling richer multimodal dataset construction for CV research.
Excel dashboards and automation workflows for Santander HQ. Resource tracking, event registration, and reporting, built fast.
AI-assisted Liquid theme customisation and product page generation. Dramatically faster iteration cycles for e-commerce clients.
Half marathon training tools, gym CV apps, location memory maps, Spotify memory layers… ideas are cheap, shipping is the work.
Services
01
LLM pipelines, document automation, custom RAG systems, and workflow tooling that actually gets used.
02
Fast, clean web presences and e-commerce stores. Vue/React frontends, Shopify Liquid, deployed on Vercel. Brief to live in days.
03
YOLO-based detection, classification pipelines, dataset curation, and deployment. From proof-of-concept to something demoable.
04
Content strategy, brand positioning, and growth systems. Proven track record scaling accounts to 500k+ followers.
About
I'm Toni Esan, based in London. I work across engineering, AI and creative product thinking. I'm not a pure researcher and not a pure developer. I build things that bridge disciplines and solve real problems with taste.
Completed an MSc in Applied AI at Cranfield (Distinction, July 2025) while working as Technical Officer at Leveret AI, a CV startup bringing AI diagnostics to NHS dental clinics. Before that, I was working in industry as a mechanical engineer, honing in on software engineering skills and web automations.
I've worked with autonomous vehicles since 2019, before Waymo made self-driving mainstream. I've grown social accounts to half a million followers, built dental AI products used in real clinics, and now run my own AI consulting practice. I wear a lot of hats, literally.
BSL, conversational Spanish and Yoruba, basic Arabic. Currently training for a half marathon. Running is the thinking time.
Blog
Coming soon
Cool news, half-formed thoughts, film takes, tech rabbit holes. Currently living in Twitter bookmarks @tonzownz.
Education
Interests
Languages