Sue Turner

Sue Turner OBE first rose to prominence in the mid-1990s as the youngest-ever Regional Director of the CBI. The role gave her an early education in the British establishment’s complex relationship with innovation and inequality. Later, as Director of Communications for The Bristol Port Company, Turner further saw how entrenched interests shape both infrastructure and opportunity. But it was during her tenure leading the Quartet Community Foundation (where she doubled grant-making and grew endowments to over £50 million) that she developed her sharpest instincts for how power can either uplift or marginalise lives.

Awarded an OBE for Services to Social Justice in 2021, Sue Turner has never confused ‘progress’ with technology alone. This is especially urgent in the AI era, where unchecked algorithms risk entrenching the very inequalities Turner has spent her career trying to dismantle. In 2020, she founded AI Governance Limited with a provocative proposition. Leaders must be held accountable for how they wield AI. Responsible AI is not a branding exercise but a matter of civic responsibility, corporate survival, and democratic integrity.

Today, as Professor in Practice for AI and Technologies at the University of Bristol Business School, Sue Turner is helping to shape the future of communities historically excluded from technology’s rewards. She argues that AI governance cannot be a luxury appended to profit. It must be embedded as a core strategy, alongside ESG and compliance, or risk becoming tomorrow’s scandal.

Turner’s thought leadership resonates globally because it rejects both dystopian fatalism and naïve optimism. Instead, she maps a pragmatic, politically literate path through AI’s ethical thickets: recognising that technology amplifies existing structures of power unless actively steered otherwise. Sue Turner’s keynotes unpack AI’s mechanics and its social consequences from recruitment bias, algorithmic injustice, data governance, to the manipulation risks of behavioural AI.