David M. Barnes, PhD, is a Brigadier General, U.S. Army (Retired), Founder and CEO of Empowering AI, an advisory practice focused on AI governance and organizational readiness for enterprise AI deployment. He is a Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich’s Institute for Ethics in AI and was previously a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI. Earlier in his career, he served as Chief AI Ethics Officer for the U.S. Army AI Integration Center (AI2C), where he led the team that built the Army’s responsible AI governance infrastructure and developed its Responsible AI Strategy. He also served as Professor and Deputy Department Head in the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He was named one of Forbes’ “15 AI Ethics Leaders Showing the Way to the Future” and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Colorado Boulder.
As an M-RCBG Senior Fellow, Dr. Barnes is studying the organizational conditions that determine whether enterprise AI initiatives scale or stall, developing practical frameworks and assessment tools to help leaders strengthen organizational readiness for AI adoption.
His faculty mentor is Teddy Svoronos, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.