Gaven Smith joins Faculty as Senior Adviser

Faculty is delighted to announce that Gaven Smith has joined Faculty as a Senior Adviser. In this new role, Gaven will support our work to ensure the application and impact of AI across all sectors is safe, responsible and robust. He will bring his extensive experience in strategy, technology and security to support our design of safe and effective AI solutions, as well as providing advice to our senior leadership team.

2024-10-14Public Services

Gaven is an internationally recognised engineering leader with more than 30 years of experience in the UK National Security community. Until late 2023, Gaven was the Director General for Technology and Chief Technology Officer at GCHQ where, in his seven years as CTO, he was responsible for the research into and development of a wide range of critical UK national security capabilities. 

A professor in cyber security at the University of Manchester, Gaven is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an active advocate for online safety, an area in which Faculty has extensive experience. His knowledge and expertise will be invaluable to Faculty as we support the development of safe AI through our AI safety research for clients including governments, frontier labs and private companies, and in our work to use AI in the public interest.

“There is no more pressing issue for many of today’s organisations than how to adopt AI – and crucially how to adopt AI safely, securely and responsibly. I am delighted to be joining the team at Faculty to support their work with organisations around the world in using AI to help transform the way they work.” 

Gaven Smith

“It’s a privilege to welcome Gaven to Faculty, and we are excited to have the benefit of his exceptional experience and expertise. Gaven’s strategic vision and depth of understanding will help inform our overarching strategy as well as our approach to specific projects, particularly the most complex and critical of our work on AI safety.”

Nijma Khan, Head of Government