Henrietta Ridley

Speaker Bio

Henrietta Ridley is the Chief AI at UNICEF, where she leads the organisation’s global strategy for safe, ethical, and inclusive artificial intelligence. Appointed in July 2025, she is responsible for driving UNICEF’s child-centric AI agenda - shaping governance frameworks, building frontier technology capabilities, and deploying AI solutions that advance health, education, protection, and digital inclusion for children worldwide.

A technical and research-driven practitioner, Henrietta combines strategic leadership with hands-on expertise in generative AI, diffusion models, variational autoencoders, RAG architectures, and reinforcement learning. She has designed and built advanced synthetic data pipelines, computer vision systems, and large-scale NLP platforms.

Before joining UNICEF, Henrietta spent over a decade applying AI at scale, most recently serving as Accenture’s UK Data Science Lead, where she oversaw a team of 80+ experts and delivered enterprise GenAI solutions across multiple industries.

Henrietta’s mission is to advance a future where AI meaningfully improves children’s lives - not by accelerating technology for its own sake, but by aligning it with equity, protection, and human development.