Most people operating in AI governance come from ethics, policy, or technology backgrounds. Lena's route was different. She spent more than two decades in London's financial markets, trading, selling, pricing derivatives and building models that had to hold up simultaneously to regulators, risk committees, and the boards of the institutions deploying them. That is an operational understanding of risk rather than an academic one, refined across twenty years of consequential decisions that had to be defensible after the fact.

AI governance is the same discipline with different instruments: models fail in ways nobody anticipated, liability accumulates quietly, and the governance that should have caught it is not in place. The organisations doing it well are the ones treating AI governance as a board-level risk discipline rather than a compliance afterthought.

Alongside Rise IQ, Lena co-founded GEN:R with Angeline Corvaglia, a responsible AI education initiative working at the intersection of young people, schools, and the governance of the technology shaping their futures.