Inma Martinez
Most boards now treat AI as a strategic line item, but few know how to translate it into operating advantage without tripping the regulators, the workforce, or the customer. The gap between AI ambition and AI deployment is widening, not closing. Leaders need someone who has sat on both sides: the commercial side that has to ship, and the governance side that decides what shipping looks like.
Inma Martinez is a digital-technology pioneer and AI scientist who helps boards turn AI from a strategic intention into a defensible operating capability, drawing on her dual role as a technology entrepreneur and chair of the G7/OECD Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence expert group.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Inma Martinez
- She chairs the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the G7/OECD body whose work fed directly into Japan’s Hiroshima Process for AI Safety. That gives her a line of sight into the regulation boards will actually have to live with.
- She built mobile AI recommendation systems with Cambridge University and Trinity College Dublin teams in the early 2000s, before recommender systems were a category. The technical fluency is real, not borrowed.
- She moves credibly between Goldman Sachs alumni networks, Nokia-era telecoms, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Spanish AI Council, and Imperial College Business School. Few AI voices are taken seriously in all of those rooms.
- Two published books, including The Fifth Industrial Revolution, give her a coherent thesis on where digital and space economies converge, rather than a list of trends.
Biography highlights
- Chair, Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group, and Co-Chair, Steering Committee, Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (G7/OECD).
- Member, AI Council Advisory Board, State Secretariat for AI, Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation.
- Expert advisor to the European Commission on Big Data and AI since 2001; collaborator with UNIDO, UNESCO, and the European Space Agency.
- Guest lecturer, Imperial College Business School; Director, Master in Artificial Intelligence, Loyola University, Spain.
- Author of The Fifth Industrial Revolution (Deusto/Planeta) and The Future of the Automotive Industry.
- Career across Goldman Sachs, Cable & Wireless, and mobile-internet ventures Escape Velocity and Visual Radio (acquired by Nokia); regularly cited by the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Time.
Biography
The hard problem in AI right now is not the model. It is the distance between what a board has committed to publicly and what the operating business can actually deploy, govern, and defend. Inma Martinez has spent the last decade working that gap from both ends.
At the policy end, she chairs the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, the G7/OECD body that shapes the rules large enterprises will eventually have to operate inside. The work she led on Responsible AI, AI Innovation, and the Future of Work fed into the Hiroshima Process for AI Safety. She also sits on Spain’s AI Council Advisory Board and has advised the European Commission on Big Data and AI since 2001.
At the operating end, her credentials are not theoretical. She built mobile AI recommendation systems with Cambridge University and Trinity College Dublin teams when the category did not yet exist, after a finance career at Goldman Sachs and a global director role at Cable & Wireless. Her mobile-internet ventures Escape Velocity and Visual Radio were acquired by Nokia. She has worked inside the innovation labs of IBM, HP, LG, and Apple.
That combined vantage point is what makes her useful to senior leadership: she can speak to a CTO about deployment, to a chief risk officer about governance exposure, and to a CEO about what the next five years of AI regulation will do to capital allocation. Her two books, The Fifth Industrial Revolution and The Future of the Automotive Industry, set out the same thesis in long form. Named outlets including the Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Time turn to her when an editorial line on AI needs a serious voice.
Key speaking topics
- Applied AI and competitive advantage
- AI governance, safety, and the G7/OECD policy landscape
- The future of work in an AI-automated economy
- Digital transformation for established enterprises and SMEs
- The Fifth Industrial Revolution and the space economy
- Connected mobility and the automotive industry’s digital reinvention
- 5G, edge and cloud computing, and the Internet of Everything
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees setting AI strategy and AI-governance posture
- CTOs, CIOs, and chief data officers moving AI from pilot into production
- Chief risk officers and general counsel scoping AI regulatory exposure
- Industry forums in financial services, automotive, telecoms, and the space economy
Audience outcomes
- A clear read on where global AI regulation is heading, from someone shaping it
- A working distinction between AI as marketing narrative and AI as operating capability
- Specific examples of where applied AI is producing measurable advantage, and where it is failing
- A defensible position on the workforce implications of AI automation
- A sharper view of how the digital and space economies will reshape industrial strategy
Talks
A practical session on moving AI from strategic intention to operating advantage inside an established enterprise.
Key takeaways:
- Where applied AI is producing real margin gains today, sector by sector
- The governance choices that determine whether AI delivers or stalls
- The capability stack a CTO and CFO need to align on before scaling
How AI automation reshapes the workforce, the skills mix, and the social contract between employer and employee.
Key takeaways:
- Which roles are being augmented, which are being replaced, and on what timeline
- The reskilling agenda boards should be holding their people leaders to
- Policy signals from the G7/OECD that will shape labour and AI law
Drawing on her book, this talk maps the convergence of AI, space commercialisation, and new industrial business models.
Key takeaways:
- Why space is becoming an industrial sector, not a science programme
- The new competitive logic for companies operating across digital and physical economies
- Where the capital is moving and which incumbents are best positioned to ride it