Dr. Rachel Gillum is a technology policy executive and scholar whose career spans AI governance, national security, and geopolitics. She built and leads Salesforce's responsible AI and platform safety policy function, setting the standards by which one of the world's largest enterprise software companies deploys AI to hundreds of millions of users across Salesforce and Slack.

As Vice President of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology, Rachel established Salesforce's ethical use policy practice from the ground up, defining its strategic vision and scaling operations across the company's acquisitions and product lines. She oversees a global team covering AI governance, content policy, trust and safety operations, and the deployment of AI agents, and manages Salesforce's Ethical Use Advisory Council, which convenes international experts from the United Nations, Freedom House, and leading academic institutions.

Rachel serves as a Commissioner on the Atlantic Council's GeoTech Commission, engaging bipartisan policymakers, industry executives, and technology leaders on AI's implications for U.S. global competitiveness. She previously served as a Commissioner on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bipartisan AI Commission on Competition, Inclusion, and Innovation. She also advises the Institute for Security and Technology's Trust and Safety Advisory Group and serves on CareMessage's Technical Advisory Board.

Before Salesforce, Rachel was Senior Director of the Silicon Valley office at RiceHadleyGatesManuel LLC, working alongside former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. She advised CEOs and senior executives, from Fortune 50 companies to early-stage startups, on geopolitics, regulatory risk, and market expansion. Earlier in her career, she served as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. government, assessing threats and policy implications in complex international environments.

Rachel's academic work sits at the intersection of technology, democratic institutions, and national security. She chairs the American Political Science Association's Task Force on AI and Race and Ethnic Politics and is an affiliated scholar at Stanford University's Immigration Policy Lab. She is the author of Muslims in a Post-9/11 America (University of Michigan Press), which examines how counterterrorism and surveillance policies can undermine the national security objectives they are designed to serve. Her research on AI governance includes a forthcoming chapter with Cambridge University Press and peer-reviewed publications in PNAS and Perspectives on Politics. Her work and commentary have appeared in Forbes, The Washington Post, Essence and more.