Collaboration, from practice, not theory.
Phaida collaborates with the institutions setting standards as well as those teaching them: multilateral bodies, development finance institutions, AI governance think tanks and policy processes, research groups, and other practitioners assembling a team for a mandate. Much of that work is shaped by academics, technologists, and policy specialists. What is usually missing is someone who can say how a rule behaves once it reaches an audit committee, a risk function, or an investment decision in an emerging market.
Phaida works with the teaching side as well: curriculum advisory for the AI governance programmes now being built in business schools and, increasingly, in social science faculties.
Some of the topics
- Evolving AI governance in practice: what boards need to know and do
- Impact and AI: from sustainability principles to accountability mechanisms
- Responsible AI in capital markets: credit, risk, investment, and oversight
- Debates and potential academic research areas
- The UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance
The questions that matter most in AI governance are not technical. They are questions about who is accountable, to whom, and through what mechanism. Those are the questions capital markets have been answering and learning from for a century. What is different this time is the pace of change: the task is to govern the basics now, and govern them well, fast enough to set global minimum standards before the technology outruns them.
This is a field Phaida contributes to and keeps learning in, rather than sells. The questions are open, the stakeholders run from individuals to companies to states, and the people working on them include scientists, regulators, civil society, and industry. What a board practitioner adds is a view from inside the accountability machinery that any eventual answer will have to run through.
Artificial intelligence is not a single invention of the past few years. It is the cumulative result of the better part of a century of work across mathematical logic, statistics, neuroscience, and physics: from Turing’s 1936 account of computability1 and the McCulloch-Pitts model of the neuron in 19432, through the 1955 Dartmouth proposal that first put the phrase “artificial intelligence” in print3 and Rosenblatt’s probabilistic perceptron three years later4, to the statistical mechanics ideas behind the Hopfield network in 19825 and the transformer architecture that underpins today’s large language models6. It will keep evolving, and the architectures now in use will not be the last. How humanity ensures that this technology remains answerable to human values, human oversight, and the common good is a question that belongs in boardrooms, in investor stewardship frameworks, and in the regulatory structures that govern institutions. It does not belong only to the engineers or companies who build these systems, and it will not be settled by principles alone.
Didem Gordon brings to this a career spent chairing audit, corporate governance, and risk committees at listed companies: a practitioner’s contribution to a conversation shaped mostly by technologists and policymakers, asking the question that is now inescapably the central question of AI governance. Who is responsible and accountable, and to whom?
“I am not a technologist. I am a governance practitioner: a career spent inside capital markets and corporate governance, now applied to the central question of AI governance. The technology moves faster than regulation can follow in detail, so it starts with minimum global benchmarks: not enough on their own, but enough to build real accountability and oversight for the risks, and the trust that stakeholders with the least power, the Global South and emerging economies, need most.”
Phaida Ventures engaged as an accredited private sector stakeholder in the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, 6–7 July 2026, and remains available to participate in further European and multilateral AI governance processes as a private sector representative.
Personal
Didem Gordon
Guest lecturing, visiting practitioner arrangements, executive education delivery, conference keynotes, and panel participation, extended selectively based on institutional credibility and fit. Open to business schools, public policy and social studies, non-profit foundations and the impact ecosystem, and research institutes.
Institutional
Phaida Ventures
Curriculum advisory for governance and sustainable finance programmes, and a growing contribution to AI governance curricula as that field takes shape. Sponsored research partnerships on AI accountability and corporate governance. Executive education programme design. Case study development drawn from real governance and capital markets experience. Practitioner in residence arrangements and co-authorship of papers.
Also, as a private sector stakeholder: consultation responses and written submissions, participation in expert and working groups, and governance input into standard setting and country level review.
Phaida welcomes conversations with institutions, organisations, and credible practitioners looking for a governance and capital markets partner on shared work.
Some engagements Phaida leads, convening the right expertise for the mandate. Others Phaida joins, contributing governance and capital markets depth to projects led by trusted partners. Both are deliberate.
The firm operates within a network of collaborators: technologists, academics, impact investors, and specialists working in and around supranational institutions. Individual practitioners are as welcome as institutions. Some of the most useful work comes from two or three people with complementary seats behind them, rather than from an organisation with a letterhead.
Capital markets licences at advanced level, in derivatives, and in corporate governance rating; a CFA Institute Sustainable Investing certificate; Harvard Business School AI Ethics in Business, August 2026; and accredited participation in the inaugural UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. All sit alongside a long practice. So does a long record of speaking: conferences in Türkiye and abroad, lectures at universities, panel discussions, and television programmes.
