Gayan de Silva, PhD
AI Leader · Professor of AI · Founder · Speaker

Gayan de Silva, PhD

Professor of AI · SRH Hamburg Co-Founder & CEO · Sensorminds Fractional Chief AI Officer Keynote Speaker PhD · Machine Learning · 2012
15+ yrs
AI/ML research & leadership
45+
Enterprise clients
17
Countries led
$20M
Annual savings contributed
IBMLead IT Specialist
CiscoLead Research Scientist
4FinanceHead of Data Science · 17 Countries
Zeta GlobalSenior Director, Data Science
SRH HamburgProfessor of AI · 2025–Now
SensormindsCo-Founder & CEO · 2023–Now
How I work with leaders

Four ways to work together

Senior AI leadership for a few days a month, or as interim Head of AI. Strategy, team, portfolio and governance, until AI works in the business.

An independent senior sounding board for CEOs, boards, AI founders and investors, from strategy reviews to due diligence.

Practical sessions for executives, boards and new AI leaders. Not AI theory, but the decisions that make AI programmes scalable, trusted and worth the investment.

Talks on AI strategy, Responsible AI and agentic AI for conferences, associations and leadership offsites, with industry, academic and founder perspectives.

Career

15+ years in AI/ML, from research to leadership

2025 – Now
Professor of AI & Program Director
SRH University Hamburg
Program Director of the MSc Applied Data Science & AI, grown from 12 to 30 students per intake in the first year. Teaching Responsible AI, Deep Learning, NLP and AI Entrepreneurship. Collaborates with the AI Startup Hub Hamburg and leads research on trustworthy AI and LLM governance.
2023 – Now
Co-Founder & CEO
Sensorminds · Prague
Building AI for manufacturing quality: automated defect detection and generative AI for precision measurement, designed to flag production issues before they scale.
2019 – 2024
Senior Director, Data Science
Zeta Global · Prague
Founded the European AI Centre of Excellence and grew it from zero to 20+ professionals across three continents, serving 45+ Fortune 500/1000 accounts. Delivered 200M daily predictions in production, contributed to $20M in annual client savings and led work resulting in a granted US patent. Implemented model auditing, human-in-the-loop decision frameworks and distribution shift monitoring across US and European operations — years before EU AI Act made them mandatory.
2016 – 2019
Head of Data Science
4Finance · 17 Countries
Led AI strategy and 29 data scientists across 17 country operations. Built the first ML credit scoring platform and launched three AI-driven product lines delivering 7% revenue growth. Credit scoring, fraud detection and risk management systems processing millions of financial decisions daily. Implemented GDPR across all 17 markets — technical controls, data processors, legal alignment — 18 months ahead of the enforcement deadline with zero compliance issues.
2013 – 2016
Lead Research Scientist
Cisco Systems
Applied machine learning research at the intersection of network security and AI. Published peer-reviewed research on formal analysis of network security properties — foundational work that directly informs current AI robustness and adversarial testing methodology.
2007 – 2013
Lead IT Specialist
IBM · Brno
Enterprise systems for Fortune 500 clients including ABB and Honeywell across 15 countries, with predictive analysis to prevent failures before business impact. In parallel: PhD research in machine learning at Brno University of Technology (2008–2012) and work on three EU research projects.
Industry experience

Deployed across regulated sectors

Financial Services & FinTech
Credit scoring, fraud detection, risk AI across multiple regulatory jurisdictions
Cybersecurity
Threat detection, anomaly classification, behavioural AI at enterprise scale
Marketing Technology
Personalisation engines, customer segmentation, 200M+ daily predictions
Manufacturing
Data collection, EU compliance architecture for European supply chains
Energy & Utilities
Predictive maintenance, grid optimisation and operational AI in regulated energy environments
Logistics & Supply Chain
Demand forecasting, route optimisation, warehouse AI at enterprise scale
SRH University Hamburg

Teaching what I have built

MSc Applied Data Science and AI
Responsible AI & EU AI Act

Ethical frameworks, bias detection, fairness metrics, transparency and accountability — directly aligned with EU AI Act Articles 9, 10, 13 and 14. Students build real compliance frameworks.

MSc Applied Data Science and AI
Applied Machine Learning

Production ML systems, MLOps, model deployment, monitoring and lifecycle management. From research prototype to enterprise production — the full delivery arc.

MSc Applied Data Science and AI
Natural Language Processing

Foundational linguistics to transformer architectures. Production NLP systems and their cross-industry applications, including explainability requirements under EU AI Act Article 13.

MSc Applied Data Science and AI
AI Entrepreneurship

Building AI-first companies, product strategy, go-to-market for AI solutions, and navigating EU regulation as a competitive advantage — not a constraint.

Research Programmes

Research that informs practice

An integrated research programme producing interlocking components of a complete enterprise AI governance stack. Every advisory engagement draws on live research — not desk reviews or theoretical frameworks. When I advise a CTO on AI governance, the tools have been validated on real systems across Finance, Retail, Energy and NLP domains.

AAA · Audit Automation
Agentic AI Auditor — Automated EU AI Act Conformity Assessment

A 6-agent LangGraph pipeline that executes a full EU AI Act conformity audit automatically — ingesting AI system documentation and model artefacts, running a 6-phase protocol, and producing a compliance report in under 2 hours. Validated on 3 real AI systems across Finance, Retail and a live production environment.

UAGF-XAI · Explainability
Four-Layer Explainability, Fairness, Uncertainty & Drift Toolkit

A unified Python toolkit integrating SHAP explainability, fairness metrics, conformal prediction uncertainty intervals and drift detection — automatically selecting the minimum sufficient evidence set for each EU AI Act risk tier. Directly satisfies Articles 13 and Annex III requirements.

ADIF · Executive Intelligence
AI Decision Failure Archetypes & Executive Competency Model

NLP and ML analysis of 200+ FTSE 350 and DAX 40 earnings call transcripts to identify seven recurring senior leadership AI decision failure archetypes. Delivers a board-ready diagnostic quantifying CXO AI decision risk and producing a competency gap roadmap.

ALCSM · Talent Intelligence
AI Leadership Credential Scoring & Gap Analysis

NLP pipeline analysing 500 LinkedIn profiles of AI title-holders against a six-dimension credential scoring model, cross-referenced with 200 job postings. Enables organisations to audit their AI leadership bench before committing to governance programmes that depend on leadership capability.

Academic credentials

Education & patents

Education
PhD · Network Security & AI/ML
Brno University of Technology · Czech Republic · 2012
MSc · Information Technology
Keele University · United Kingdom
BSc (Hons) · Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering
University of Moratuwa · Sri Lanka · Top-ranked A-Level, National Mathematics Olympiad finalist
Patents
Consumer Sentiment Analysis for Selection of Creative Elements
US12073438B2 · Granted
Automated Optimal Threshold Selection for Record Linking Using Probabilistic Matching
Application 17/735,093 · Filed 2022
Automated Data Source Weight Selection for Customer Segmentation Clustering
Application submitted 2024
Work together

The next step is a 30-minute conversation

About your AI agenda, your leadership team or your event. No pitch, just a clear next step.