Emma Di iorio

I am CEO and co-founder of Spriggun, a specialist AI governance, data protection, and cyber risk advisory firm; before that, I spent over a decade building and running data protection, privacy, and AI governance functions inside global organisations, including growing Diageo%27s global privacy function from four people to twenty-four across 180 countries. I set strategy and requirements at board and executive level, working closely with the CDAO and CISO to build genuine partnership across the business; I%27m effective at building relationships across legal, tech, and the executive team, and at framing legal and regulatory risk in terms a board can act on.
I have held senior privacy, AI, and cyber governance roles for well over a decade: legal lead for AI at Airbnb, senior privacy and AI counsel roles across global functions, and now board and executive advisory through Spriggun. I brief boards and audit committees directly, having done so at Diageo, and I have sat on ethics committees at Diageo and Adecco.I have also held Trustee roles at Good Vibrations, a criminal justice charity, and the University of Bristol.
The organisations that benefit most from this are ones facing AI adoption, data privacy or data governance complexity, or cyber and regulatory exposure without an established framework for board-level oversight of those risks: companies rolling out AI at scale, organisations navigating EU AI Act, UK GDPR, NIS2, or DPDP readiness, and boards that need someone who can distinguish genuine governance risk from noise and challenge management constructively without duplicating executive work.