Rachel Adams

Dr Rachel Adams is the CEO and Founder of the Global Center on AI Governance (GCG), an Africa-based organisation advancing equitable AI governance worldwide. She leads the Global Index on Responsible AI and the African Observatory on Responsible AI. She is also Executive Director and Research Professor at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) at the University of Cambridge, and an Honorary Research Fellow at The Ethics Lab in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town.

Adams is an internationally recognised expert on AI governance, global inequality, and the political economy of emerging technologies. Her research and policy work sits at the intersection of AI, development, human rights, geopolitics, and global justice, with a particular focus on how AI is reshaping power relations between states, corporations, and communities in the Global South. She has published extensively on AI governance, technology and inequality, digital empire, and the ethics and politics of innovation. She is the author of three books, including Transparency: New Trajectories in Law, Human Rights and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in South Africa and The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality.

Adams has advised governments, multilateral institutions, and international organisations across Africa, Europe, and beyond.  was one of the lead drafters of the African Union Commission’s Continental AI Strategy, a landmark framework guiding the development and governance of AI across the continent. She also serves on numerous international expert committees and advisory boards, including for UNESCO, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the AI Safety and Ethics Committee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Multistakeholder Expert Group of the Global Partnership on AI.

She holds degrees in English Literature, International Human Rights Law, and Philosophy.