I work where data, AI and human decisions collide.
I’m Siobhan Solberg. I advise organisations on data privacy, data governance and AI governance. I also speak about what happens when the systems we build to understand, predict and make decisions about people meet the messy reality of being human.
My work sits somewhere between legal, technology and business.
Which is useful, because that’s usually where the problems are.
I’ve spent most of my career asking awkward questions.
Before moving into privacy and governance, I worked in marketing, analytics and optimisation.
I spent years helping companies collect more data, understand customers better and make better decisions from it.
Then I started asking harder questions about what we were collecting, why we were collecting it, what we were inferring from it and whether any of it actually made for better decisions.
Those questions eventually took me from marketing and analytics into privacy, data governance and AI.
Today, I work with leadership, legal, data, product and technology teams to make sense of the decisions sitting underneath their systems.
Not just: Can we do this?
But:
Why are we doing it?
What assumptions are we making?
Who does it affect?
Who gets to decide?
And what happens when we get it wrong?
Governance should help people make better decisions.
Too much governance is built around documents, controls and approval processes.
Those things matter.
But they are not the point.
The point is making sure organisations can use data and AI without losing sight of the people represented by that data, the judgement being delegated to technology or the responsibility that still sits with the humans deploying it.
That means translating regulation into something operational.
It means understanding how the technology actually works.
And it means being prepared to challenge a technically possible or commercially attractive idea when the underlying decision doesn’t make sense.
No compliance theatre. No governance for governance’s sake.
Just better decisions.
Advisor.
I advise organisations on complex questions involving data privacy, data governance and AI governance.
Sometimes that means helping build the governance foundations.
Sometimes it means pressure-testing a new AI system, data use or technology decision.
And sometimes it means sitting alongside leadership when there isn’t a neat answer and working out what a defensible one looks like.
Speaker.
On stage, I explore many of the same questions from a different angle.
How does AI change human judgement?
What happens when organisations get very good at predicting people?
Why do technically successful systems fail when they meet actual humans?
And what does it mean to make responsible decisions about people once those have been turned into data?
I speak at conferences, leadership events and organisations around the world on the human consequences of data, AI and technology.
