Ayantola Alayande

Funded by the Clarendon and Trinity College, my research examines the concepts of sovereignty versus multilateralism in the digital sector — especially AI and related technologies, asking two questions: (i) how do multilateral institutions, amidst the growing fragmentation of international order, advance interstate cooperation in the development and governance of AI systems? (ii) in response, how do low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) balance such international cooperation demands with their individual digital sovereignty ambitions (such as data protection, compute self-sufficiency, and technical standards setting)? In answering, I examine the networks of actors and governance mechanisms in bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral AI & data infrastructure projects in South Africa and India.

Before Oxford, I was a researcher in digitalisation and productivity at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge, and before then, Research Exec at Kantar. Since 2023, I have worked on AI in LMICs, previously as a Research Fellow with Research ICT Africa and currently as a Researcher with the Global Center on AI Governance (GCG), where I have worked on several projects including the AU Continental AI Strategy, the African Observatory on Responsible AI, the Grand Challenges Generative AI Project, and others. I have also, in the last 4 years, led innovation and research partnerships as a consultant with Dataphyte Nigeria.

I am an alum of the University of Ibadan; the KDI School of Public Policy; and the University of Edinburgh, where I was a Mastercard Foundation Scholar and received the overall performance & dissertation prizes for my class.