THE STORY BEHIND OUR NAME

I am a Strategist, Innovator, Policymaker, and Applied Ethicist.

I created Daedalus Futures because I felt that existing approaches to using AI responsibly were becoming too focused on compliance, which I think is a huge missed opportunity.

During my six years as Strategy Director and Head of Ethics at Koa Health – a digital mental health company that uses AI – I developed and implemented a strategy that put ethics (essentially a responsible approach) at the heart of its strategy to transform mental health care.

This involved: the development of a set of ethical principles, bespoke to Koa and aligned to its commercial strategy; working with teams across the business to embed the ethical principles into daily practice; and the establishment of internal and external governance processes, including an annual external audit of delivery against the ethical principles.

In a competitive market, with lots of well-evidenced products, Koa's ethical approach helps it to stand out from the crowd, and established it as a leader in trust within digital mental health. This has contributed to securing client contracts, and been recognised in the industry, for instance Koa won a Welcoa Trailblazer award in 2022.

In short, Koa's responsible approach to AI differentiates it and supports it in its aim to transform mental health care.

This is why I created Daedalus Futures, to help other organisations to thrive through using AI that is both transformational and responsible.

As I mention above, prior to founding Daedalus Futures, I worked at Koa Health as Strategy Director and Head of Ethics. I was one of the founding executive team at Koa, which span out of Telefonica Alpha in 2020 with a €50m Series A. 

Before Koa Health I was Director of Strategy and Innovation at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, responsible for investing £100m over five years in innovations across acute, primary, and integrated care, biomedical research and digital health start-ups. 

I was a Senior Civil Servant in the UK Department of Health; responsible for UK Tobacco Control Policy, and UK Obesity Policy before that, writing the government’s first comprehensive childhood obesity strategy. I was also a Policy Adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Tony Blair. 

I have an MA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, and I am currently studying part time for a Masters in AI Ethics and Society at Cambridge University.

I work with organisations across all sectors, developing bespoke solutions for each client. Based on need I will draw on colleagues from across my network. For instance, I am part of the Ethical Intelligence network of AI ethics experts, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

I am a contributor to research papers, including:

• Clavell, Zamorano, M. M., Castillo, C., Smith, O., & Matic, A. (2020). Auditing algorithms: On lessons learned and the risks of data minimization. AIES 2020 - Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 265–271. https://doi.org/10.1145/3375627.3375852
• Buda, T. S., Guerreiro, J., Omana Iglesias, J., Castillo, C., Smith, O., & Matic, A. (2022). Foundations for fairness in digital health apps. Frontiers in Digital Health, 4, 943514.

I am also a regular speaker about AI, ethics, and trustworthy technology at conferences.

I live in Madrid and am always happy to meet for a coffee.

Although the polarisation of the debate between AI benefits and AI risk is over-simplified and unhelpful, moving beyond it does not mean that an easy answer to balancing the risks and rewards of AI emerges.

I believe that finding the right balance of AI benefits and AI risk for any particular organisation requires reference to a higher-level goal: thriving.

I choose thriving rather than, say, revenue growth or profit, because thriving is more inclusive and more holistic.

It is inclusive because it is not only businesses that can benefit from AI. Not-for-profit and government organisations can, and indeed must, also benefit from AI, and Daedalus Futures works with organisations from every sector.

Thriving is a more holistic goal because it recognises that no organisation can truly succeed if its employees, clients, and the societies that it exists in are not themselves thriving.

I have developed the framework for thriving - which I call the Thrivalism framework - to underpin the work of Daedalus Futures in creating the AI strategies that will help organisations to thrive.

The framework is based on the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, and describes three core goals that must be pursued in order to maximise human thriving: realise outcomes that are important to people; improve and augment human capabilities; and support human agency.

When assessing an organisation and how it is, or plans to use AI, the Thrivalism framework provides three analytical lenses through which to examine the organisation's goals, organisational plan, implementation, and governance.

1. Outcomes - how does the organisation help clients to realise outcomes that are important to them?
2. Value alignment - to what extent does the organisation align with the values of its clients, employees, and others affected by the service, such that it augments rather than limits their capabilities?
3. Meaningful participation - do those significantly affected by the organisation have meaningful input into prioritising its outcomes, values, and the managing of trade-offs?

By taking each of the three analytical lenses, the benefits and risks of an organisation's use of AI can be examined in a way that reaches to its very heart. This allows a balance to be found that is appropriate for the organisation, and embedded within its structures and processes.

If you'd like to learn more about the thinking behind the Thrivalism framework then you can read a deep dive by clicking here and providing your contact details to access a pdf.