Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano
Most diversity programmes have stopped producing measurable change. Budgets stay flat or fall, while the political cost of running them rises. Leaders need someone who can rebuild equity as an operating practice inside talent processes, products, and AI tooling, not as a campaign that lives on the side.
Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano helps companies turn diversity programmes into operating systems by redesigning the talent processes, products, and AI tools where inequity actually gets produced.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano
- She built the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment used inside the Atlassian Team Playbook, giving People teams a measurement framework they can run themselves rather than a workshop they have to repeat.
- She has held the senior internal seat twice, at Atlassian and Culture Amp, so her recommendations come from running the function at scale, not from observing it.
- Her work on AI ethics is grounded in current academic study at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre, which means the responsible-AI content is current with regulation rather than recycled from 2021 DEI decks.
- She treats equity as a product and operations problem. That makes her useful to CHROs, Heads of Product, and AI leads, not only to DEI specialists.
- She speaks credibly to the post-DEI-backlash context: how to keep inclusion outcomes when the political signalling has to come down.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of The Mathpath, advising on equitable operations, responsible AI, and ESG.
- Former Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact, Culture Amp.
- Former Global Head of Diversity & Belonging, Atlassian. Built the function from scratch.
- Inventor of the Balanced Teams approach and the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook.
- Master’s candidate in AI Ethics and Society, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.
- Board director at Circle of Blue and the Culture Amp Foundation; limited partner at Operator Collective. Featured in Wired, Wall Street Journal, Australian Financial Review, and USA Today.
Biography
Diversity programmes were designed for a political environment that no longer exists. Budgets are smaller, scrutiny is sharper, and the language that worked five years ago now invites litigation in some markets and ridicule in others. The companies that still want inclusion outcomes have a problem: they need the results, but they cannot keep running the programme in its original form.
Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano works on that problem from the operations side. She built Atlassian’s Diversity & Belonging function from scratch and scaled it across the company’s international expansion, then joined Culture Amp as the first Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact. The Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment she developed at Atlassian became part of the company’s public Team Playbook, which is why her frameworks are familiar to People teams who have never met her.
Through The Mathpath, her consultancy, she now advises leaders on the same question at a higher altitude: how to embed equity into talent processes, product decisions, and AI deployment so that the outcomes survive without the political infrastructure. Her current academic work at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence sits behind the responsible-AI content, which has become a larger share of her client engagements.
She is direct about what does not work. Unconscious bias training is not, in her reading, a solution. Equitable design is. Her audiences leave with a clearer view of where inequity is actually produced inside their organisation and which operating levers, talent process, product practice, AI tooling, will move it.
Key speaking topics
- Equitable operations and organisational design
- Responsible AI and algorithmic bias
- Talent process redesign and ERG programmes
- Inclusion in a post-DEI-backlash context
- Equitable product development
- ESG and ethical business operations
Ideal for
- CHROs and Heads of People rebuilding inclusion strategy under new constraints
- Heads of Product and AI leads embedding fairness into model deployment and product practice
- ERG sponsors and DEI leads under pressure to demonstrate operating impact, not activity
- Executive teams reviewing where to take DEI investment next
Audience outcomes
- A clearer map of where inequity is produced inside your own talent and product systems
- A working definition of equitable design, with examples of where it replaces conventional DEI activity
- Specific guidance on evaluating AI tools for fairness risk before deployment
- A read on how to keep inclusion outcomes when the political signalling has to come down
- Language for talking about equity that holds up in front of a sceptical board
Talks
Why the standard diversity programme stopped producing results, and what replaces it inside the operating model.
Key takeaways:
- Where conventional DEI spend fails on its own measurement
- How to redesign talent processes so equity is the default outcome
- What an intersectional, data-informed approach looks like in practice
A working view of where bias enters AI systems and what organisations deploying LLMs need to control for.
Key takeaways:
- The specific points in model development and deployment where harm to marginalised users is produced
- What responsible AI governance looks like inside a People and Culture function
- Questions to ask vendors before procurement
For People and Culture leaders choosing and deploying AI tools across the talent lifecycle.
Key takeaways:
- Evaluation criteria for AI tooling in hiring, performance, and engagement
- How to spot fairness risk in vendor demos
- Where to put human review back into automated decisions
Embedding equity as an ongoing operating practice across decisions, policies, and product.
Key takeaways:
- How to apply the Equity Lens to a live decision, not a retrospective audit
- Where the lens changes the outcome and where it does not
- How to make the practice survive a change in leadership