Bold - Interview with Gemma Galdon
March 29th, 2026
We were lucky to catch up with Gemma Galdon Clavell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Gemma, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
My confidence and self-esteem as a woman CEO didn’t come from trying to “act” confident, but from doing work that is deeply worth doing.
Leading in AI auditing and impact is incredibly rewarding because it sits at the intersection of technology and people’s lives. Helping improve systems so they work better, more safely, and more fairly is a purpose that’s easy to believe in on the hard days, and energizing on the good ones. That sense of purpose grounds me: it turns doubt into focus.
And this is reinforced, repeatedly, by evidence. I see the value of my leadership in the clients and partners who come to Eticas.ai precisely because we bring something rare: a socio-technical lens and the ability to translate complex issues (bias, harms, privacy, accountability) into practical fixes and better decisions. Every time a team tells me, “You helped us see what we were missing,” or a project shifts course because our audit surfaced a real risk, it builds a quiet kind of confidence: not performative, but earned.
So my self-esteem is less about bravado and more about alignment, between what I do, why it matters, and the real impact I can point to.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I lead a company and a foundation in a field that still surprises people: algorithmic auditing -the work of opening up AI “black boxes” to test whether they actually work as promised, and whether they do so safely and fairly in the real world. My startup, Eticas.ai, works with organizations to evaluate and improve AI systems. In parallel, the Eticas Foundation supports community-led audits and public-interest work so that accountability doesn’t depend only on who can afford it. I’m not a serial entrepreneur and I’m not building to flip. I’m building both for the long term, because I’ve built something rare: the ability to work full-time on making the world a little better, with rigor and staying power.
That commitment has been with me for as long as I can remember. I was a very active activist in my youth, showing up, organizing, campaigning, trying to right wrongs in the ways available to me. Later, I became successful in more traditional professional settings, but I never wanted to lose that sense of purpose. AI became the bridge. At a moment when automated systems increasingly shape the most consequential parts of life (who gets hired, who gets admitted, who gets a loan, who gets flagged, even what support someone receives in healthcare) being able to interrogate these systems and demand evidence feels like activism with tools. It’s still about justice, but it’s also about method: measuring impact, finding failure modes, and pushing for fixes.
What feels most exciting and special about this work is that it’s both deeply technical and deeply human. You can’t evaluate AI responsibly without understanding data, models, and metrics, but you also can’t do it well without understanding institutions, incentives, and the lived experience of the people affected. That socio-technical perspective is what Eticas is known for: translating messy real-world harms like bias, privacy risks or reliability failures into concrete findings and practical mitigations that teams can implement.
Lately, many of our clients have been coming from the field of education, where the stakes are enormous and the AI guardrails are often weak. We’ve audited a range of systems used in schools and higher education and found many to be deeply problematic, not always because the intentions are bad, but because the assumptions are wrong, the data is brittle, and the impact on students can be profound. Helping schools, students, and education authorities understand what AI can contribute, and where its limits and risks are, has been some of the most meaningful work I’ve done. When AI is framed as “objective,” it can quietly narrow opportunities; when it’s tested and governed properly, it can genuinely expand them. That is a fantastic thing to wake up to every morning.
On a personal level, this is not abstract for me. I migrated to the U.S. relatively recently, and I had a troubled childhood. My life has been, in many ways, about beating the odds -beating the algorithms. And I worry that poorly designed AI systems can reduce that possibility by turning people into predictions, as if futures were fixed and unchangeable. I don’t believe they are. AI can do better, and it must, because these systems are increasingly part of the infrastructure of opportunity. My work is about making sure that, as AI reshapes society, the people most affected are not an afterthought, but the center of the story.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Looking back, three things made the biggest difference for me, each of them practical, and each of them learnable.
First: a socio-technical lens. Early on I became convinced that you can’t understand technology without understanding the systems around it: policy, incentives, institutions, and power. I wrote my PhD on technology policy long before “AI” was the topic it is today, and I made it deeply technical on purpose. That combination didn’t make me popular in academic spaces at the time, and I often felt like an outlier, but it also opened many doors outside academia and it continues to be my superpower in a highly technical field. It taught me how to translate between worlds: engineers, policymakers, lawyers, communities, executives. My advice to anyone early in their journey is to build that bilingualism, wherever you are, and to practice connecting the dots, because that’s where the real leverage is.
Second: independence, especially financial independence. This is one I think about often as a woman CEO. Virginia Woolf wrote about the need for women to have “a room of one’s own”, and what she meant, in part, was the power that comes with financial autonomy. Building independence has allowed me to walk away from unfair or abusive situations, to decline contracts or funding that didn’t align with my values, and to speak my mind without calculating the personal cost every time. In a world where women’s credibility is still undermined far too easily, independence is not a luxury -it’s protection and freedom. My advice is to be deliberate about it: save, strategize, understand your numbers, and make choices that increase your options over time.
Finally: role models. They don’t need to be heroes, and they don’t need to be perfect. I’ve found it incredibly helpful to collect examples (sometimes just one trait!) from many different people. When you can point to something concrete you admire, it becomes easier to imagine yourself building it too. Early in your journey, don’t wait to feel “ready.” Instead, find a few people whose work or way of leading, working or being resonates with you, study what they do, borrow what’s useful, and let that guide your own style.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
The most impactful thing my parents did for me was, quite simply, take care of me. That may sound ordinary, but it wasn’t. I was born to a mother who was only fourteen, and stability is not something you can assume in that situation. The fact that I was cared for at all made me deeply grateful, and it gave me an early sense that life is both fragile and precious, something you have to show up for and make the most of, even when the odds aren’t neatly in your favor.
At the same time, my childhood wasn’t marked by the kind of intentional guidance many people describe in their success stories. There weren’t big expectations placed on me, and I could feel that, less in words than in the quiet absence of a roadmap. That lack of expectation also meant a lack of support in navigating milestones that are straightforward for others.
But with time, I’ve come to see that this also gave me something unexpected: room to build myself. When no one is projecting a destiny onto you, you have to invent your own. It forced me to develop an internal compass, through trial, stubbornness, and curiosity, and to grow into a person I don’t think anyone could have predicted. I wouldn’t romanticize hardship, but I can acknowledge that, in my case, the absence of a predetermined path pushed me to create one, and gave me the gratitude and humility that allows me to make the most of every second of it.
Source URL: https://www.armilla.ai/resources/from-audit-to-insurance-building-the-infrastructure-ai-safety-is-missing