Title:GTA Alumni Spotlight: Jason Velez (MBA’12)

Meet Jason Velez (MBA’12), Managing Director at Davies Consulting

Please introduce yourself.

I am Jason Velez, Managing Director at Davies Consulting UK, where I lead our global strategic advisory practice in AI governance, enterprise risk, cybersecurity, and regulatory transformation for systemic financial institutions and technology-driven enterprises. Parallel to my corporate mandate, I serve as a Board Member for a clinical-stage medical software enterprise dedicated to digital health innovation, and I am the Founder and Principal of The New York Advisory Group, LLC (NYAG), a boutique strategic firm advising executive suites on model risk management and regulatory modernization.

My career spans nearly three decades of leadership at the intersection of deep tech and institutional finance, including tenures at Microsoft, Google, Bridgewater Associates, and Goldman Sachs. My foundational perspective as a former Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) deeply informs my current applied research and advisory work regarding high-trust AI architectures, systemic risk, and cross-border regulatory strategies.

Academically, I am a proud 2012 graduate of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and I am currently completing my doctoral research focused on leadership and emerging technology governance. As a practitioner-inventor, I hold two utility patents for enterprise governance platforms—Vindexion eGRC® and Apexion DFP™—both of which are fully commercialized. Dedicated to advancing industry dialogue, I am a newly elected member of the Forbes Technology Council, an Executive Sponsor and Mentor for the Purdue University Research Foundation and Innovation Incubator, and the author of an extensive portfolio of long-form research published via QuantumSeek Publishing® and LinkedIn, where I focus on translating complex regulatory frameworks into actionable corporate strategy.

How did your time at Georgetown influence your career path in the tech industry?

Georgetown was a foundational influence long before I matriculated. Having spent twelve years in Jesuit education within New York City, the principles of intellectual rigor and integrity—the continuous pursuit of excellence in service to others—were already deeply internalized. Returning to a Jesuit institution for my graduate work felt like a natural alignment of values.

When I entered the McDonough School of Business, I arrived as an experienced operator from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Yet, the Georgetown ecosystem provided a transformative layer of leadership development. I was embedded in a cohort of exceptional peers whose backgrounds were forged in high-consequence environments: military officers, federal agency strategists, and public servants. Learning alongside individuals who understood mission-driven discipline and honor at the highest level profoundly recalibrated my definition of leadership.

That environment reinforced for me that technology is never neutral; innovation must be anchored by robust ethics and strict governance. Georgetown did not simply accelerate my career trajectory—it fundamentally sharpened the strategic and moral lens through which I evaluate AI risk, structural governance, and corporate responsibility today.

What are your top priorities in your current role, and what do they look like?

My mandate centers on three interconnected strategic priorities designed to help global enterprises navigate complex technological shifts:

• Architecting High-Trust AI Frameworks: I advise global executive committees on the operationalization of responsible AI, ensuring that deployment is scalable, resilient, and structurally compliant across disparate legal jurisdictions—including the US, EMEA, and emerging markets. By synthesis of my enterprise risk background and CISO experience, I help organizations institute rigorous controls that treat AI risk not merely as a compliance checklist, but as a core pillar of operational resilience.
• Aligning with Global Standards-Setting Bodies: The regulatory landscape for frontier technology is shifting rapidly. I maintain active engagement with the evolution of frameworks from institutions like NIST (such as the AI Risk Management Framework) and ISO/IEC 42001. Ensuring that our client strategies are proactively aligned with these institutional benchmarks is critical to future-proofing global enterprises.
• Advancing Applied Industry Research: Thought leadership is an explicit responsibility of seniority. Through QuantumSeek Publishing® and rigorous, long-form editorial contributions on LinkedIn, I actively publish deep-dives into semantic knowledge graphs, agentic AI risk, and cyber-regulatory convergence. This research is designed to provide C-suite executives and board directors with the analytical clarity required to govern complex digital ecosystems.

How do you navigate governance frameworks to ensure organizations use AI responsibly?

Navigating AI governance successfully requires institutional discipline, methodological clarity, and an avoidance of market noise. First, I counsel senior leaders to anchor their strategies in rigorous, peer-reviewed, and standards-aligned sources. The current market contains significant asymmetry and hyperbole; grounding corporate policy in verified frameworks like NIST or formalized international standards ensures technical and regulatory defensibility.

Second, I operate an open-door, collaborative advisory model across my consulting practices, council seats, and foundation assignments. True governance cannot occur in an ivory tower. By lowering the friction for direct, cross-functional dialogue between technical founders, academic researchers, and enterprise executives, we build the high-trust cultures necessary to manage evolving risk profiles.

Finally, I view intellectual curiosity as a core governance competency. Responsible AI demands that leadership teams proactively challenge assumptions, interrogate model lineage, and continuously upgrade their own technical literacy. The organizations that lead the next decade will be those that match the velocity of their innovation with the velocity of their governance.

What do you wish more people understood about the tech industry?

I wish there was a broader recognition that software engineering and systems architecture are, at their core, deeply ethical exercises. The development of advanced technology—particularly autonomous and generative AI—cannot be divorced from human responsibility. Every architectural choice, data ingestion pipeline, and algorithmic optimization carries profound implications for privacy, security, and systemic trust.

High-performing engineering cultures recognize that protecting the end-user is a foundational, non-negotiable obligation rather than a secondary engineering constraint. Brand equity and enterprise value are directly correlated with how safely and ethically an organization safeguards its user data and operational integrity.

The ultimate challenge of building frontier technology is rarely the complexity of the source code; it is the integrity of the intent behind it. It requires the institutional discipline to consistently verify that what we build strengthens the broader ecosystem and honors the trust capital placed in us by the market.

What is your favorite app or website, and why?

LinkedIn is the platform I value most, specifically because it has evolved into a high-caliber global forum for enterprise practitioners, researchers, and executive leaders to conduct substantive, peer-level dialogue. It is one of the few digital ecosystems capable of hosting complex, asynchronous debates on topics like AI model risk, cybersecurity telemetry, and international regulatory strategy at a macro scale.

Publishing institutional-grade analysis on the platform serves as an excellent discipline for my own work. It challenges me to distill highly technical, abstract governance concepts into clear, strategic insights that global executives can immediately execute. I view this communication model as a professional responsibility: to humanize and clarify complex structural shifts so that leaders can steer their organizations with confidence rather than apprehension.

What is one piece of advice you would give to a Georgetown student interested in tech?

My core counsel to the next generation of Georgetown leaders is to deliberately cultivate a professional profile defined by both profound depth and expansive range.

• Depth requires the rigorous pursuit of mastery within a specific technical or strategic domain that commands your focus. True subject-matter expertise is an appreciating, highly durable asset in an automated economy.
• Range requires the intentional exposure of your intellect to diverse industries, functional areas, and global operating models. My own career capital was built by operating across enterprise software, global banking, sovereign markets, and quantitative hedge funds. This cross-disciplinary exposure broadens your mental models and dramatically elevates your strategic perspective.

A recent experience captures this perfectly: a Georgetown sophomore studying anthropology reached out to me directly to discuss the sociological impacts of AI governance for an undergraduate research project. His proactivity, analytical courage, and willingness to step completely outside his primary discipline exemplified the exact traits required to excel. Own your intellectual capital. Cultivate domain expertise, deliberately expand your cross-functional range, and maintain an insatiable curiosity. That combination is rare, highly defensible, and extraordinarily potent in the technology landscape.

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