Dame Wendy Hall
Boards are being asked to make capital and risk decisions on AI while the rules around it are still being written. The pressure is no longer whether to deploy, but how to deploy defensibly when regulators in Brussels, Washington and Beijing are pulling in different directions. Most executive teams do not yet have a clear view of who is setting those rules, on what timetable, and what compliance, data and infrastructure choices will look like on the other side.
Dame Wendy Hall is a computer scientist and AI policy advisor who helps boards and governments make defensible decisions about AI and digital infrastructure as international rules take shape.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dame Wendy Hall
- Direct line of sight into where AI rules are heading. Hall sat on the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body that wrote “Governing AI for Humanity”, and co-chaired the UK government’s 2017 AI Review with Jerome Pesenti.
- A framework for the geopolitics of digital infrastructure. Her book with Kieron O’Hara, “Four Internets”, sets out the competing Silicon Valley, Brussels, Washington and Beijing models that determine where data and AI capability can actually be deployed.
- Engineering credibility, not commentary. Her team at Southampton built the Microcosm hypermedia system in the mid 1980s, before the Web existed, which gives her arguments about platform design a foundation most policy voices lack.
- She can explain how AI systems actually produce their outputs to a board with no technical background. That is the subject of her next book, “AI Explained” (Wiley, September 2026), written for exactly that reader.
- Standing inside the institutions that boards now have to follow. Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, President of the British Science Association from September 2026, former Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute, founding co-director of the Web Science Research Initiative with Tim Berners-Lee.
Biography highlights
- Regius Professor of Computer Science, a Crown appointment, and Director of the Web Science Institute, University of Southampton; co-founder of the Web Science Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt.
- Member, UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence; contributor to “Governing AI for Humanity” (2024).
- Co-chair of the UK government’s independent AI Review with Jerome Pesenti, “Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK” (2017), and the UK’s first AI Skills Champion.
- Co-author, with Kieron O’Hara, of “Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace”, Oxford University Press, 2021; co-author, with Pete Rai, of “AI Explained: A Guide for Non-Technical Readers”, Wiley, September 2026.
- Managing Director of the Web Science Trust; President of the British Science Association for 2026-27; Co-Editor-in-Chief of Royal Society Open Science; co-chair of the ACM Publications Board.
- Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Society; Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, which awarded her its Sir Frank Whittle Medal in 2026; first non-North American President of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Biography
The teams writing the rules for AI and digital infrastructure are small, and they sit inside a handful of governments and multilateral bodies. Most boards now have to operate within those rules without much access to the people drafting them. Dame Wendy Hall is one of those people.
She co-chaired the UK government’s 2017 AI Review with Jerome Pesenti, “Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK”, which set the structure of the country’s AI strategy. She became the UK’s first AI Skills Champion the following year. In 2023 the UN Secretary-General appointed her to the High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, which delivered “Governing AI for Humanity” in 2024. She chaired the Ada Lovelace Institute from 2020 to 2023.
The policy work rests on three decades of original computer science. Her team at Southampton built Microcosm, a hypermedia system, in the mid 1980s, before the Web existed. In 2006 she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt. Web Science, the field she helped establish, treats the Internet and AI as social systems shaped by politics, power, and human behaviour as much as by code. She is now Regius Professor of Computer Science at Southampton, a title conferred by the Crown, and directs the university’s Web Science Institute.
Her book with Kieron O’Hara, “Four Internets” (Oxford University Press, 2021, with a foreword by Vint Cerf), maps the four competing value systems, Silicon Valley, Brussels, Washington and Beijing, that now determine where data flows, where AI can be trained, and where products can be sold. Senior teams come back to it when they have to make a capital decision about where to put a data centre or a model. Her next book, “AI Explained: A Guide for Non-Technical Readers”, is published by Wiley in September 2026, the same month she takes office as President of the British Science Association.
Key speaking topics
- Artificial intelligence policy and governance
- The geopolitics of data and digital infrastructure
- Web Science and sociotechnical systems
- AI strategy for national and corporate competitiveness
- Internet governance and platform regulation
- Women in technology and the AI skills pipeline
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees making capital allocation decisions on AI, data and digital infrastructure
- Chief technology, chief data and chief AI officers responsible for defensible deployment
- Government, regulator and multilateral audiences working on AI and Internet governance
- University and research leadership shaping national AI strategy and skills
Audience outcomes
- A working map of the four competing models of Internet governance and what each means for cross-border data and AI
- A sharper read of where UN, EU, UK, US and Chinese AI rules are converging and diverging
- A view of AI strategy that connects technical reality, regulation and national competitiveness
- A first-hand account of how independent AI reviews and advisory bodies are drafted and how to influence them
Talks
How AI, data and digital infrastructure are redrawing global power, and what that means for organisations operating across the US, the EU and China.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI rules are being set, by whom, and on what timetable
- Which parts of a global operating model are exposed to digital sovereignty rules
- Which points of cooperation between the major blocs survive the current rivalry
A working account of how AI systems produce their outputs, and which commercial claims about them hold up.
Key takeaways:
- How the current generation of models works, from first principles, without the technical vocabulary
- Which capabilities are real now and which are being sold ahead of delivery
- Where the operational risk in an AI deployment actually sits
What regulators in Brussels, Washington, London and Beijing are trying to achieve, from someone who has sat on the bodies drafting the rules.
Key takeaways:
- What the EU AI Act and its counterparts are designed to control
- How to engage a regulator constructively before a rule is fixed
- How to build a compliance position that holds as the rules change
The long-term consequences of current AI choices for democracy, knowledge and human agency.
Key takeaways:
- Which decisions being made now will be hard to reverse later
- What AI is doing to the production and verification of knowledge
- Where human judgement has to stay inside the system
A first-hand account of building authority inside technology and policy institutions that were not designed to include her.
Key takeaways:
- How influence is actually exercised inside government and multilateral bodies
- What it took to become the first President of the ACM from outside North America
- What organisations get wrong when they build an engineering and AI talent pipeline