Dame Wendy Hall

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.
• Standing inside the institutions that boards now have to follow. Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, 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, University of Southampton, appointed by the Crown in 2017.
• 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).
• Co-author, with Kieron O’Hara, of “Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace”, Oxford University Press, 2021.
• Co-founder of the Web Science Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt; Managing Director, Web Science Trust.
• Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Society; Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering; 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. 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, and she now serves as Regius Professor of Computer Science at Southampton, a title conferred by the Crown.

Her book with Kieron O’Hara, “Four Internets” (Oxford University Press, 2021, with a foreword by Vint Cerf), is the clearest available map of 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. That is the document senior teams come back to when they have to make a capital decision about where to put a data centre or a model.

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