Richard Benjamins

Dr. Richard Benjamins is Former Chief Responsible AI Officer at Telefonica and founder of its “AI for Society and Environment” area, including the ethical use of AI. Before that he was the company’s Chief AI & Data Strategist.

He is among the 100 most influential people in data-driven business (DataIQ 100, 2018).

He is co-founder and Vice President of the Spanish observatory for ethical and social impacts of AI (OdiseIA), board member of the environmental non-profit CDP Europe.

He forms part of the advisory board of the Centre for Digital Culture at the Vatican, of MIT-Sloan’s panel on Responsible AI, and is external AI expert for the AI Observatory of the European Parliament.

He is also co-chair of UNESCO’s business council for their AI recommendation, and member of GSMA’s AI for Impact taskforce.

He was Group Chief Data Officer at AXA (Insurance), held during 10 years executive positions at Telefonica on Big Data and Analytics, and was a member of the B2G data-sharing Expert Group of the EC.

He co-founded iSOCO, an early AI startup, in 1999.

Furthermore, he holds a PhD in Cognitive Science, has published over 150 scientific articles, is founding editorial board member of Springer’s AI Ethics journal, and is author of the books “The myth of the algorithm” (Spanish) and “A Data-Driven Company” (English, Spanish), and “The algorithm and I” (Spanish). He is a frequent speaker on Artificial Intelligence events, and a strategic advisor to several start-ups and companies.