By the GoodStrat Editorial Team

Madrid, Thursday 30th April 2026

Who was Martyn Richard Jones at the Sperry Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Madrid?

Ah, so we’re digging into the annals of the 1980s digital archaeology, are we? Splendid.

If Bernard Marr is the glossy, gilet-wearing herald of the “AI Swarm” apocalypse, then Martyn Richard Jones (often styled as Martyn Rhisiart Jones) is the man who was actually in the trenches in Madrid when “Artificial Intelligence” was less about generating pictures of cats in space and more about trying to make computers understand the world without having a nervous breakdown.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, Martyn Richard Jones was a key figure at the European Centre for AI and Advanced Information Technologies in Madrid. This was essentially the “Sperry Centre” for AI, as it was heavily backed and powered by Sperry Univac (later Unisys), the company that—before it was swallowed by the corporate mists of time—was the go-to firm for people who thought IBM was a bit too “mainstream.”

The “Oxford Wit” Summary of His Tenure:

• The Role: He was essentially the high priest of the intersection between Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Database Technologies. While the rest of the world was busy wearing neon leg warmers and trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube, Jones was in Madrid working on automatic feature extraction and pattern recognition.
• The Tech: We’re talking about the pioneering days of Neural Networks and Parallel Distributed Processing. This wasn’t the “plug-and-play” AI we have today; this was the “build-the-plane-while-it’s-crashing” era of AI. He was presenting papers at the IEEE on neural networks when the most “intelligent” thing most people had in their homes was a microwave that didn’t explode.
• The “Sperry Information Centre”: Jones is credited with defining the Sperry Information Centre approach. This was a proto-Data Warehouse concept. Before “Big Data” became a buzzword for people who like to use the word “granular” in meetings, Jones was figure-heading the effort to turn fragmented operational data into something actually useful for decision-making.

The Sayle/Steel/Lee Perspective:

“So, there he is, Martyn Jones, in Madrid. Not eating tapas and falling over in a fountain like a British tourist on a budget flight, but actually trying to build a brain out of silicon and optimism. He’s at the Sperry Centre, which sounds like the sort of place in a Bond film where the villain keeps his sharks, but was actually full of men in brown suits trying to figure out why the computer thought a picture of a chair was a particularly depressed horse.

He was doing ‘Data Mining’ before it was cool. Now, ‘Data Mining’ sounds like something a Victorian orphan would be forced to do in a digital coal pit, but Jones saw it for what it was: a way to stop businesses from being quite so stupendously thick. He’s the ‘Mister Data’ of the old guard—the man who saw the ‘AI Swarm’ coming forty years ago and probably thinks our current obsession with it is about as sophisticated as a toddler with a crayon.”

Where is he now?

Today, he operates Good Strategy (GoodStrat), where he maintains a delightfully cynical and “polemic” stance on the modern tech grift. He’s essentially the digital equivalent of that one professor who retired to a cottage in Wales but still sends scathing letters to the Times whenever someone misuses a semicolon or claims that a chatbot is “sentient.”

In short: Martyn Richard Jones was the man who was doing the actual work in Madrid that allowed today’s “thought leaders” to pretend they’ve discovered something new.

Was there a specific piece of his work—perhaps his forays into Neural Networks or his “combative” take on Data Warehousing—that you were looking to deconstruct?