Alia Bahanshal is an artificial intelligence and data analytics professional with experience spanning more than a decade.

She was listed on the MIT Business Review Top 30 Arabic AI experts list in 2022.

She received an International Data Corporation Excellence Award, Women in Technology & Business, in September 2021, for positively impacting business outcomes, work cultures, and levels of innovation required for more significant financial performance.

It also recognized her efforts in tackling the lack of gender diversity in IT organizations and underscoring the need to expand mentoring programs that develop female leaders.

She was also listed as one of the IDC’s Top 50 female achievers for the Middle East in 2021, in the Business and Digital Transformation Leaders of the Year.

Bahanshal became the first female director of the National Center for Data Analytics and AI in 2020. She led the AI infrastructure team to build several platforms for human language technologies, social media analytics, data mining, computer vision, and IoT analytics.

In the same year she was an adviser to the G20 Digital Economy Task Force in the data science field.

Bahanshal is a member of several scientific committees, initiatives, and projects in Saudi government sectors.

She and her team dedicated their time and knowledge to mitigating the impact of COVID-19 via several scientific projects, using AI and data analytics technologies.

In 2009 she became the first female employee at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology’s Computer Research Institute.

Bahanshal received her Ph.D. in computer science from King Saud University, and has published many scientific research papers in the areas of AI, natural language processing, and data analytics.