NXT shortlisted AI Excellence Award Surrey Business Awards 2026

From Codegarden to Guildford: A Year of AI Recognition

In June 2026, the NXT team flew to Copenhagen for Codegarden — the annual flagship conference of the Umbraco community — and came home with the Best Innovation with AI award. Independent technical judges from across the global Umbraco ecosystem had reviewed how we built the Exclusive Networks platform and validated the AI decisions our developers made. It was a meaningful moment for the whole team. That international recognition opened a new conversation. It felt right to ask whether what we'd built translated into something meaningful closer to home — to our own county, our own business community. We submitted for the Surrey Business Awards, and on 5 October 2026 our nomination in the AI Excellence Award category was confirmed. Being judged by people who understand both business impact and technical implementation is exactly the kind of external validation that tells you whether your approach is sound. The Umbraco community gave us one lens on that in Copenhagen. The Surrey Business Awards — and Surrey Business School's involvement in the judging process — offer another.

About the Surrey Business Awards 2026

The Surrey Business Awards are run by Platinum Media Group in association with Surrey Chambers of Commerce and are, in their own description, the largest and most prestigious business awards event in the county. The awards celebrate achievement, innovation and growth across all sectors, with categories covering Best New Business, Business Growth, Sustainability Champion, Employer of the Year and, this year, AI Excellence.

The 2026 ceremony takes place on Thursday 19 November 2026 at G Live, Guildford — the same town NXT has called home since 2002. Finalists across all categories were announced on 5 October 2026. Sponsors for the 2026 awards include KPMG, DMH Stallard, Heathrow Airport, Moore Kingston Smith and Surrey Business School, among others — a strong indicator of the weight the awards carry in the county's business community.

The AI Excellence Award — and the Competition

The AI Excellence Award is sponsored by Surrey Research Park — one of the UK's leading technology business parks, home to more than 100 companies on the University of Surrey campus in Guildford. The category recognises Surrey businesses using artificial intelligence to deliver genuine, measurable improvement: not AI as a marketing term, but AI embedded in how a business actually operates, serves customers, or builds products.

The six finalists for 2026 are:

• Broadplace Advertising

• FACT360

• Finchetto

• NXT Digital Solutions

• PlanningAgent360

• Ronins Group

Being shortlisted alongside these organisations — several of which are among Surrey's most recognised names in AI-driven services — reflects the strength of the category and underlines what makes reaching the final six genuinely competitive.

The Project Behind the Nomination: Exclusive Networks

Exclusive Networks is a global cybersecurity value-added distributor operating across more than 50 countries, with content teams working in 28 languages. When they came to NXT, their legacy WordPress platform had become a business liability: security risks, degraded SEO performance, and day-to-day content management challenges that couldn't scale at the global level their business demands.

NXT delivered a complete enterprise transformation — one of the most complex builds in our history. The headline numbers: 20,000+ pages migrated across 50 websites and 26 multilingual installations, built on Umbraco CMS and hosted on hardened Azure infrastructure.

The AI work sat at the centre of how the platform operates:

• AI-powered translation workflows embedded in the Umbraco back office — editors in all 28 languages work within a governed, consistent CMS environment rather than managing external translation processes manually

• Automated redirect management — at 20,000+ pages across 50+ sites, AI pattern recognition handles redirect generation when content is restructured, reducing operational load and minimising broken user journeys

• HubSpot CRM and AI-driven Workday integrations — connecting the CMS with broader business infrastructure

• Technical SEO and GEO foundations — ensuring the platform surfaces correctly across both traditional and AI-driven search

The Umbraco Awards judges in Copenhagen called it a clear leader in practical AI innovation, noting how the project embeds AI directly into the CMS and extends Umbraco's native multilingual capabilities. That assessment is what informed our submission for the Surrey Business Awards.

The Interview: Surrey Business School and the Technical Scrutiny

As part of the assessment process, NXT was interviewed by Erin Chao Ling, Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work and Director of Executive Education at Surrey Business School. It was a rigorous and genuinely interesting conversation.

Erin's questions focused on the architecture and application logic of the Exclusive Networks platform — specifically, how AI had been used to improve the experience for two distinct groups: end users navigating the site, and Exclusive Networks' own editorial and marketing teams working inside the CMS back office.

We walked through the code and the workflows in detail: the AI translation pipeline, the automation logic for content operations and redirect management, and the governance layer that makes the system manageable for back-office editors across 28 languages. We also discussed some of the legacy constraints of the original CMS system — the kinds of technical debt and architectural decisions that a migration at this scale surfaces and has to resolve, rather than simply replicate.

Surrey Business School's focus on AI in the context of work and organisations gave the conversation a different angle from the purely technical review at Codegarden. Where Codegarden judges assessed the implementation at code and architecture level, the interview here focused on operational impact: what the AI actually enables the people using the platform to do, and how that changes day-to-day work. Being able to answer both kinds of question confidently, about the same project, is what the dual recognition across these awards represents.

What the AI Actually Does in Practice

It is worth being specific here, because AI-powered has become a phrase that covers a wide range of things, from genuinely transformative to largely cosmetic.

Back-office editing: The editorial teams at Exclusive Networks manage content across 28 languages. Before the rebuild, translation was a largely manual process: content created in one language, exported, sent for translation externally, returned, and re-imported into the CMS. With the NXT-built platform, AI translation is integrated directly into the Umbraco back office. Editors working in their own language see translated content surfaced within their existing CMS workflow, with human review built into the process. AI handles the volume work; editorial judgement is retained where it matters.

Redirect management at scale: Across 20,000+ pages and 50+ sites, redirect management is a genuine operational challenge. When content is restructured, deprecated, or moved between language variants, the redirect matrix is complex and error-prone to manage manually. AI automation handles pattern recognition and redirect generation, reducing administrative load and the risk of broken user journeys that damage SEO performance and user trust.

User experience across 50 markets: On the public-facing side, AI translation capabilities mean that visitors in their own language are served content that is accurate and contextually appropriate, not literal machine translation that reads awkwardly or misrepresents brand positioning. For a business operating at enterprise scale across 50 markets, that consistency has direct commercial value.

What This Means for AI Web Development in Surrey

Being a finalist for the AI Excellence Award at the Surrey Business Awards matters to NXT for a specific reason: it is local recognition for work we do on a global scale.

NXT was founded in Guildford in 2002. We have been building Umbraco platforms and .NET solutions for over 20 years, and our clients span the UK and internationally. But our home is Surrey, and so is our team. Knowing that the work we are doing in enterprise AI and web development is being recognised at the county's premier business awards — by a judging panel with genuine academic and commercial expertise in AI — is meaningful in its own right.

It also reflects something broader about where AI in web development stands right now. The kinds of AI workflow integration we built into the Exclusive Networks platform — embedded, governed, operationally meaningful, built into the CMS rather than bolted on as a feature — were not mainstream conversations in the web development sector two years ago. They are now. The existence of an AI Excellence category at the Surrey Business Awards, with six strong finalists competing for it, is a signal of how quickly the landscape has shifted.

If you're a Surrey business, or a business anywhere in the UK, thinking about what AI could genuinely do within your website, your CMS, or your wider digital infrastructure — and you want to talk to a team that has built it at enterprise scale with a real track record of recognition — we'd like to hear from you. Get in touch.