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ABOUT ISABEL
Isabel Velarde is an executive and advisor with over 20 years of professional experience working at the intersection of technology, investment ecosystems, digital policy, and gender equity in technology across Latin America.
From Technology and Digital Transformation
to AI Governance and Policy
Her work has addressed how organizations adopt and govern technology-driven decision systems, and what happens when those systems operate in contexts where regulatory frameworks are nascent, institutional oversight is limited, and the populations most affected are systematically underrepresented in the data and processes that govern them.
She currently serves as Executive Fellow in AI Governance and Responsible AI at the Digital Growth Collective, London; as President of the Gender Equality in Technology Committee at the World Business Angels Investment Forum, affiliated with the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion; and as Founding Partner at LACBAN, the Latin America and Caribbean Trade Association for Business Angels, where she works on AI due diligence and risk-informed investment analysis for early-stage funds evaluating AI-enabled ventures across the region. She also serves on the Advisory Board of UNIFY Platform AG, Switzerland, a global research and innovation platform aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Her engagement with public policy includes membership on Peru's National Digital Talent Strategy Expert Committee, under the Secretariat of Government and Digital Transformation of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers; consulting work with the United Nations Volunteers Programme in Latin America and the Caribbean; and advisory engagement with Inter-American Development Bank programs supporting women-led STEM ventures. She is also a Luminary Thinker at RedBoxMe, developed in collaboration with Cartier International.
She holds executive education credentials from MIT Sloan, Wharton, Northwestern University – Kellogg, and Harvard Business School, and is certified in Ethics in the Age of Generative AI.
THE CORE QUESTION
Latin America is deploying AI faster than it is building the institutional capacity to govern it.
Algorithmic systems are making consequential decisions about who gets credit, who gets hired, and who gets seen, in markets where the regulatory frameworks to govern them are still being written.
In Latin America, these gaps are not abstract. They are institutional. The communities with the most exposure to algorithmic harm have the least influence over how those systems are designed, deployed, and audited.
This is the problem Isabel Velarde works on, through advisory engagements, policy research, and institutional dialogue across Latin America and globally.