Phillip Tomlinson

Phillip Tomlinson is, by his own description, a commercial person who landed in digital water and never left. He read Law at Sheffield Hallam, picked up an Open University MBA along the way, and built his career on the selling-and-strategy side of water technology rather than the engineering bench, first at Halma Water Management, then through twelve years at Metasphere where he rose to Commercial Director. Today he is the Chief Revenue Officer of FIDO Tech, a UK company whose AI listens for the hidden leaks bleeding water out of utility networks, which is a neat fit for a man whose LinkedIn headline is simply "reducing global water loss through technology."

Phillip Tomlinson came on the show in September 2024 wearing a different badge, because Grundfos, the Danish company most people know as the largest pump-maker in the world, had just bought Metasphere, the IoT analytics business he had spent twelve years inside. ("IoT" here just means the small connected sensors that sit on a network and phone home with data.) When we recorded, he was nine months into Grundfos as its Digital Solutions Leader for water utilities, sitting, as he put it, between product development, the innovation function and the old Metasphere team to work out which solutions actually belong together in the market. Metasphere's specialty, and increasingly Grundfos's, is the unglamorous plumbing of the wastewater network: monitoring the combined sewer overflows (the points where sewers are designed to spill into rivers when they are overwhelmed) and giving utilities real visibility of what their underground networks are doing.

Phillip Tomlinson's central argument is that the water industry has spent its money lopsided. His view is that of the last forty years, roughly thirty-five went on clean water, on leakage, on non-revenue water (the treated water a utility produces but never gets paid for because it leaks away or goes unmetered), on metering and connections, while wastewater was left behind. Only in the last decade, and mostly in the UK and Europe, has the money started flowing the other way. He is refreshingly two-faced about the public anger over sewage spills, and I mean that as a compliment: he understands why water companies are being vilified, he thinks some of the criticism of how they behaved is fair, and yet he argues the backlash is "an incredibly good thing" because without the public suddenly caring, the industry would not be moving at the speed it now is.

Phillip Tomlinson has a definition of innovation that has nothing to do with gadgets, and it is the lens he brings to the commercial question every utility actually wrestles with, which is how to pay for any of this. His answer is that the capital-versus-operating-cost debate is a balance-sheet problem rather than a technology one, because in other parts of the world he has sold smart-sewer monitoring as a full as-a-service model where the utility simply pays a daily fee. The single change he would most like to see is treated wastewater being recycled and used as a mainstream water source, which is exactly the bet you would expect from someone who thinks the next chapter of the industry is written in the parts of the network most people would rather not think about.

“Innovation in action for me is living with change with purpose. So innovation is actually just about change.”

Phillip Tomlinson is, in the end, the rare commercial leader who finds the sewer network genuinely interesting, and that is precisely why he is worth listening to on where the water sector spends its next decade.