AI Governance Global 2024

Matt leads Google’s business and operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa - helping people, communities, companies and countries make the most of technology and harnessing it for good. He also works on shaping responsible products and policies within Google as regulation develops, including working closely with policymakers on codes of practice and the launch of Google’s Safety Engineering Centres in EMEA.

Joining Google in 2007 he led Google UK for five years, then a group of European Countries before taking his current role as President of EMEA in 2014. Matt was a driving force behind Grow with Google, a global initiative that’s trained 20 million people across the region in the skills needed for the jobs of the future. He has a longstanding interest in sustainability and has been a key figure in Google’s journey from carbon neutrality in 2007 to carbon free by 2030.

Prior to Google, Matt spent time in media, marketing and strategy, including at the UK’s biggest news publisher and management consultancy McKinsey. He has held trustee positions of The Media Trust and The Climate Group, and was a non-executive Director at retailer Sainsbury’s for nine years. He has an MBA from London Business School, an MA from Cambridge and won silver for Cambridge in several Boat Races. He was a member of the British Rowing team, winning medals in eights and fours at World Championships and representing Great Britain at the Olympics. He is a Steward of Henley Royal Regatta, a part-time rowing commentator and coach and still competes regularly, though more slowly. Matt lives in London, near the Thames, with his wife, student sons and small but remarkably noisy dog.

Sir Nick Clegg is President, Global Affairs at Meta. He joined the company, then called Facebook, in 2018 after almost two decades in British and European public life. Prior to being elected to the UK Parliament in 2005, he worked in the European Commission and served for five years as a member of the European Parliament. He became leader of the Liberal Democrat party in 2007 and served as Deputy Prime Minister in the UK’s first coalition government since the war, from 2010 to 2015. He has written two best-selling books, “Politics: Between the Extremes” and “How To Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again).”

Kate Jones is a human rights and public international lawyer and former British diplomat with over 20 years’ experience in law and diplomacy, now focusing on academia, advocacy and consulting. She has long been interested in the application of human rights to the digital environment. She focused on this area because of the risk that digital developments fail to take account of international and domestic human rights frameworks, carefully developed since 1945.

Initially she focused on human rights as a framework that will harness the benefits of digital technology while avoiding grave erosion to our democratic systems. This is reflected in her 2019 Chatham House paper “Online Disinformation and Political Discourse: Applying a Human Rights Framework”.

She has extensive experience in human rights negotiation, litigation, implementation and strategy as well as research. She focused on human rights law during her 13 years as a lawyer and diplomat with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This included 7 years in multilateral postings, first as Legal Adviser to the UK Mission in Geneva and then as Deputy Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. For example, while in Geneva she led for the UK, and eventually the EU, the negotiations that brought about the adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. In Strasbourg, she was a key member of the UK’s Council of Europe Presidency team. She was in the UK seat for negotiation of the Brighton Declaration that led to adoption of Protocols 15 and 16 to the European Convention on Human Rights. While in London, she focused on counterterrorism as well as a range of areas of public international law and related domestic law (including international humanitarian law, immunities, treaty law, international enterprises law, aviation, law applicable to the UK Overseas Territories.)

She spent five years at the University of Oxford, as Director of the Diplomatic Studies Programme (Foreign Service Programme). In that role she had the privilege of using and refining her legal and diplomatic experience in leading, managing and teaching a brilliant, wide-ranging postgraduate curriculum, helping to develop some of the finest minds of the next generation while in parallel developing her own broader perspectives and research.

A UK-qualified lawyer, she began her career as a trainee, then a litigation solicitor with international law firm Norton Rose, and spent several months as a Judicial Assistant at the UK Court of Appeal. There she had the privilege to work for two inspiring lawyers: Lord Bingham who at that time was Lord Chief Justice, and Lady Justice Butler Sloss who at that time was President of the Family Division and the first ever female judge to sit the Court of Appeal.

As Microsoft’s Vice Chair and President, Brad Smith is responsible for spearheading the company’s work and representing it publicly on a wide variety of critical issues involving the intersection of technology and society, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, environmental sustainability, human rights, digital safety, immigration, philanthropy, and products and business for non-profit customers. He leads a team of roughly 2,000 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals located in 54 countries and operating in more than 120 nations.

In Smith’s bestselling book, coauthored with Microsoft’s Carol Ann Browne, “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age,” he urges the tech sector to assume more responsibility and calls for governments to move faster to address the challenges that new technologies are creating. In his podcast by the same name, Smith and his guests expand on the themes in the book, exploring potential solutions to the digital issues shaping the world today. The New York Times has called Smith “a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large” and The Australian Financial Review has described him as “one of the technology industry’s most respected figures.” He has testified numerous times before the U.S. Congress and other governments on these key policy issues.

Smith joined Microsoft in 1993, first spending three years in Paris leading the legal and corporate affairs team in Europe. In 2002, he was named Microsoft’s general counsel and spent the following decade leading work to resolve the company’s antitrust controversies with governments around the world and companies across the tech sector. Over the past decade, Smith has spearheaded the company’s work to advance privacy protection for Microsoft customers and the rights of DREAMers and other immigrants, including bringing multiple lawsuits against the U.S. government on these issues.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Smith was an associate and then partner at the law firm of Covington and Burling, where he is still remembered as the first attorney in the long history of the firm to insist (in 1986) on having a personal computer on his desk as a condition for accepting a job offer. In addition to his work at Microsoft, Smith is active in several civic organizations and in the broader technology industry. He has served on the Netflix board of directors since 2015 and chairs the board of directors of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program.

Smith grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, where Green Bay was the big city next door. He attended Princeton University, where he met his wife, Kathy. He earned his J.D. from Columbia University Law School and studied international law and economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be followed on Twitter and LinkedIn. His podcast, “Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith,” is available on all podcast platforms.

Dragoș Tudorache is a Member of the European Parliament and Vice-President of the Renew Europe Group. He is the LIBE rapporteur on the AI Act, and he sits on the Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET), the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), the Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (PEGA), the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE), and the European Parliament's Delegation for relations with the United States (D-US). He was the Chair of the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in the Digital Age (AIDA).

Dragoș began his career in 1997 as a judge in Romania. Between 2000 and 2005, he built and led the legal departments at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the UN missions in Kosovo. After working on justice and anticorruption at the European Commission Representation in Romania, supporting the country’s EU accession, he joined the Commission as an official and, subsequently, qualified for leadership roles in EU institutions, managing a number of units and strategic projects such as the Schengen Information System, Visa Information System, and the establishment of eu-LISA.

During the European migration crisis, Dragoș was entrusted with leading the coordination and strategy Unit in DG-Home, the European Commission Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, until he joined the Romanian Government led by Dacian Cioloș. Between 2015 and 2017, he served as Head of the Prime Minister’s Chancellery, Minister of Communications and for the Digital Society, and Minister of Interior. He was elected to the European Parliament in 2019. His current interests in the European Parliament include security and defence, artificial intelligence and new technologies, transatlantic issues, the Republic of Moldova, and internal affairs.

Prof. Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. She is Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures in EFI, and co-Director of the BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Professor Vallor's research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. Her work includes advising policymakers and industry on the ethical design and use of AI. She is a standing member of the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and a member of the Oversight Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Professor Vallor received the 2015 World Technology Award in Ethics from the World Technology Network and the 2022 Covey Award from the International Association of Computing and Philosophy. She is a former Visiting Researcher and AI Ethicist at Google. In addition to her many articles and published educational modules on the ethics of data, robotics, and artificial intelligence, she is the author of the book “Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting” (Oxford University Press, 2016) and “The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking” (Oxford University Press, 2024).