MrDavid Shrier

David Shrier is Professor of Practice, AI & Innovation with Imperial Business School.

He serves as Founding Director of the Trusted AI Alliance, a multi-university initiative to build a better future by creating responsible & trustworthy AI, while simultaneously addressing the urgent need for more effective translation of academic research into real-world impacts. His academic teaching focus is on using technology innovation to drive change at scale.  He also created the economic theory of Intelligence Capital, a new unified theory for the AI age that includes a new Theory of the Firm (Micro), Theory of Industrial Organisations (Meso) and Theory of Markets (Macro).

David presently leads the AI Ventures module (a novel cross-campus collaboration spanning 6 graduate degree programmes including Department of Computing MSc; Electrical Engineering MSc AI; Imperial Business MBA, EMBA and MSc IEM) and teaches Fintech Strategy (on hiatus 2025-2026). David is also a Visiting Scholar with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has been a noted institution-builder who has directly secured more than US$144 million for MIT, University of Oxford and Imperial College London in research, corporate and digital learning revenue.

Among other endeavours, David created the four most profitable online classes in history for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford, engaging over 20,000 innovators in more than 150 countries, and in the process creating a new multi-billion-dollar industry category that revolutionised the business model of online learning for major universities. The contract he negotiated and closed on behalf of MIT with Getsmarter-2U led directly to the subsequent $800 million acquisition of edX from MIT and Harvard by 2U in 2021. Other efforts he pioneered generated an additional $100+ million of academic revenue.

David's extensive work in multistakeholder and inter-institutional collaborations includes: having founded the Trust::Data Initiative at MIT with Professor Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, now comprising more than a dozen corporate partners (EY, Mastercard, IBM, etc.) and governmental organisations (France, Colombia, World Bank etc), and which both directly resulted in Fidelity Investments spinout Akoya, now helping to securely manage financial data of more than 350 million consumers, and the EU architecture for managing personal data ('making GDPR work'); creating the Oxford Leadership & Diversity for Regulators programme with the Alliance for Financial Inclusion and Women's World Banking, which has engaged more than 50 governments serving over 1 billion people to drive financial inclusion for women in the developing world; standing up a Living Lab in South Australia that attracted thousands of new jobs to the region; creating the Data Academy for the United Nations, training UN-OCHA and UNHCR nontechnical professionals on how to use data in humanitarian crisis; developing a virtual AI entrepreneurship accelerator for the Government of Canada together with faculty from MIT and Ryerson University that increased venture formation rates by 50% over on-campus activities; launching the Oxford Cyber Security for Business Leaders online programme together with Mastercard, seeking to change practise of cyber security across 50,000 member banks and incorporating a novel attack simulation designed by the MIT Games Lab; creating the MIT Translational Innovation Alliance together with Deloitte and Mahindra Finance, providing a new model for venture acceleration in the fintech sector https://deloitte.wsj.com/articles/from-campus-to-company-a-new-startup-model-for-fintechs-01544493735
leading the MIT Visionary Investing Program (developed in collaboration with the Harvard Kennedy School), which engaged more than 200 ultra high net worth families in a structured series of workshops to build capacity around impact (ESG-aligned) investing.

David is a globally recognized thought leader in technology and educational innovation, parallel entrepreneur, and author.

David's government portfolio includes advising the Minister of Finance of Luxembourg on AI, and developing a whitepaper on Sovereign AI & Defence for the UK's MOD.  His prior advisory work included supporting the European Parliament's Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI) under the auspices of the STOA committee during the development of the EU AI Act; helping the Commonwealth Secretariat develop the Commonwealth Fintech Toolkit , serving on the European Commission's High Level Group on citizenship innovation, and advisory roles with HMRC, UK DIT and FINRA (US).

He also is active with industry in the practice of innovation science having developed $11 billion of growth initiatives for Fortune 1000 companies, private equity, and venture capital. David has spun four AI-enabled companies out of MIT, and is presently Executive Chairman of Orbu.AI and of Phorum.AI, and separately served on the Board of GRIID Infrastructure (NASDAQ: GRDI) through its sale to CleanSpark (CLSK). His advisory firm Visionary Future works with corporate and government clients applying technology to drive change at scale. He also is a Senior Advisor to Dandelion Science and AlphaBiome.

David has published ten books since 2016 focused on technology disruption, the eight most recent of which with MIT Press, Harvard Business Publishing or Little Brown. His 2022 book, Global Fintech, was released by MIT Press and won the Choice Award from the American Library Association for Outstanding Academic Title. David's most recent book, Basic AI: A Human Guide to Artificial Intelligence, was published in 2024 by Little Brown and (as 'Welcome to AI') by Harvard Business Publishing.

David's disclosures on his investment holdings and advisory clients can be found under the 'portfolio' and 'advisors' tabs at the Visionary Future website.

For speaking inquiries, visit DavidShrier.com.