Ana Brandusescu is a researcher, policy analyst, and advisor who works on the critical and accountable use of AI. Previously, Ana led research and policy projects on government transparency and digital inclusion to advance the open web as a public good and a basic right at the World Wide Web Foundation. She organized and presented at conferences and workshops on open government, open data and tech policy in over 20 countries, predominantly in the Global South. Ana wrote numerous reports for international NGOs, including the Web Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Open Knowledge Foundation. She co-authored a critique of AI in gender-based discrimination, in the United Nation’s first global report on gender and technology.
Ana’s expertise is routinely sought by the press, politicians and the private sector to guide policy. She provided testimony on AI governance to Canadian parliamentary committees, on Bill C-27 and the AI and Data Act as well as the impact of facial recognition technology. Her research contributions and perspective have been featured in Forbes, Global News, The Globe and Mail, The Logic, Truthout, Investigative Journalism Foundation, and Journal de Montréal. She currently is in the Public Interest AI Working Group of the 2025 AI Action Summit, on the Research Advisory Committee of the Global Data Barometer, and served on Canada’s Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Open Government.
As a PhD candidate, Ana researches the scale of AI governance pertaining to two significant dimensions: political power and privatization. She was awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture Doctoral Scholarship. This work continues her research on AI policy and public investments in Canada conducted at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montréal as the 2019-2021 McConnell Professor of Practice. Frequently cited, her report was the first of its kind mapping of the AI investment landscape in Canada. Ana also co-leads AI for the Rest of Us, a project exploring meaningful civic participation in AI decision-making.
During her appointment as Balsillie Scholar, Ana will explore how AI public governance is influenced by jurisdictional levels, identify geographic centres of power and explicate how privatization manifests in public AI governance with chatbots. She will build a transjurisdicitonal AI governance model that highlights the role of cities regarding the province and the federal government where it concerns AI.