An innovative and strategic leader highly skilled in blending board governance and technology.

Pauline Norstrom created Anekanta® AI and Anekanta® Consulting to help the boards and leaders of organisations to responsibly govern high-risk AI technology while achieving a beneficial effect and return on investment.

She built upon her unique and diverse experience in the application of emerging technology for security and safety purposes across sectors from retail to transportation.

Innovative, strategic, and gets the job done

During the last 25 years of her corporate life, she has developed, challenged and led global teams and businesses offering various specialised video-based detection and analytics systems, from silicon to cyber-hardened devices to software, through complex channel structures in both regulated and unregulated environments internationally. Whilst continually challenging bias, she brings empathy and compassion and keeps the teams focused on the goals.

Norstrom developed indirect routes to market, influencing the end customer technology choices through intellectual positioning, stakeholder management and compelling user propositions. She has led her teams to build relationships which evoke inspirational pull-through and technical design-in within vertical markets from retail banking, education, transit, utilities, government, bricks and mortar retail, 3PL, aviation, renewable energy, healthcare and leisure industries.

Entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship

The experience Norstrom applies to Anekanta® AI and Anekanta® Consulting is rooted in entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, both of which underpin her corporate strategy skills borne out of high-stress, high-risk transformation environments. Innovative creative thinking and problem-solving fuelled by her Mensa qualification are at the heart of every previous Board role from subsidiary VP/President, Managing Director, Parent Company Group Director and Chief Operating Officer. A strong ability to see through many situations which seemed too complex to resolve has carried Norstrom through in the most difficult environments.

Guidance, influence and leadership

In addition to her executive roles, she has also held non-executive positions including the Chair of the Board of Directors of the British Security Industry Association (now an honorary member appointed by the Board to advise on artificial intelligence policy). She is also an active advisor to Government groups, the Institute of Directors Expert Advisory Group for Science Innovation and Technology aligned with the UK Government Department of Science, Innovation and Technology and the American Security Industry Association. She brings leadership, best practice and horizon scanning to leading work in; cybersecurity policies to protect mission-critical security and OT systems, an ethical guide for the use of automatic facial recognition technology, the new british standard for the ethical use of facial recognition technology in video surveillance, the national body developing the artificial intelligence standards to underpin the EU AI Act and the ‘AI in the Boardroom‘ AI Governance guidelines for Directors. These are examples of the work Norstrom undertakes to pioneer and develop the ethical and operational guardrails needed to protect individuals while fostering the safe innovation of technology. She is also a start-up business mentor to a number of entrepreneurs.

Contextual AI impact and risk advisory

After several approaches from technology companies and professional colleagues seeking her help, Norstrom identified a gap in the market for a niche strategic advisory business which engages the C-Suite level decision maker and advises about the benefits and pitfalls of emerging technology in a way which joins technology, ethics and commercial success.

Anekanta® was formed in 2016 and Anekanta® Consulting’s proposition was born in late 2019, and in a few months, developed its global blue chip client base and portfolio despite the backdrop of the COVID restricted economy. If anything, the pandemic made decision-makers more aware of digitalisation, more open to ideas towards understanding the potential benefits of new technology.

Furthermore, the development of Anekanta® AI and its positioning as the leading brand follows several years of private research and development into the contextual use of high-risk AI technology for the Anekanta® client base. We have been providing research and advisory services to global organisations for many years, and now, the highly valuable impact and risk system developed by Anekanta® is in service, evaluating and advising organisations about the best risk mitigations for the contextual scenarios. The brand is aligned with the EU AI Act and all global privacy and AI legislation, both passed and pending.

Pioneering and leading with artificial intelligence

Norstrom has a life long commitment to learning, constantly reading and seeking intellectual challenges and opportunities to solve commercial, social and environmental problems through the ethical use of technology. To boost her already strong, 20 year background understanding of the development and application of AI in industrial settings, she embarked on the University of Oxford, Said Business School Artificial Intelligence Programme (2019) achieving the highest grade level. She is also a Law, LLB (Hons) undergraduate studying in her spare time*.

It is not all about technology, Norstrom is a life-long environmentalist, campaigner for equal treatment and elimination of bias, and a supporter of sustainability, arts, music, culture and people, not to leave out a long term interest in motorsport. She thrives outside the comfort zone, standing out to plough new furrows followed by those who also see that there is a way forward which is different from what they may have expected.

Norstrom develops sustained and productive professional relationships through building trust, active listening and sound, objective advice combined with collaborative delivery for mutual benefit.

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*Anekanta® does not provide legal advice, nothing published by Anekanta® constitutes legal advice nor should it be construed as such, it consults the leading law experts when a legal opinion is required.