By Alan Perestrello, Managing Director, Hart Square
When someone has spent three decades helping people and organisations work out what technology can actually do for them, you can expect an informed and nuanced perspective: less about hype, less about alarm, more about what to do next.
That is why we approached Dr Sue Black OBE to open TechSmart 2026. Her career has been built on making technology useful and fair for the people who have to live with it, which puts her among a small number of people qualified to talk about AI honestly, without a sales pitch on one side or a warning siren on the other.
Sue is currently Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University, where she is also Director of EDI in the Computer Science department. She was named in the top 20 most influential people in UK Tech by ComputerWeekly.com in 2025.
Much of Sue's career has focused on helping people and organisations get more out of technology, work that has reached everyone from refugee mothers rebuilding their careers to the UK Prime Minister. That range, from grassroots projects to government, is exactly the perspective TechSmart's charity and membership audience needs when working out what AI means for their own missions.
In 1998, Sue set up BCSWomen, the UK's first online network for women in computing, at a point when almost nobody was thinking about that problem in a structured way. In 2012 she founded techmums, a social enterprise that helps disadvantaged mothers retrain into technology careers. More recently she has led #TechUPWomen, a programme doing the same job for women from underserved communities.
In 2011, Sue ran the campaign to save Bletchley Park, the site on which thousands of codebreakers, Alan Turing among them, worked in secret during the Second World War. By 2008 the site had no external funding and was at risk of closure. Sue spent three years building a campaign that garnered widespread support, from fellow computing academics to Stephen Fry. It worked. Bletchley Park secured the required funding to put its future beyond doubt.
The wider list of what Sue has done since is long enough that most of it never makes it onto a speaker page: over forty academic computer science papers, a coding book underway with Penguin, a trustee role with Comic Relief and a role as Digital Ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education. Both are charity board roles, which means she has sat on the other side of the table from TechSmart's delegates and understands the pressures they are managing first-hand. She has fulfilled a long-standing ambition to appear on Desert Island Discs, and she co-created and hosts a podcast on the history of computer science that reached the top five of Apple's UK technology chart. She was awarded an OBE for services to technology in 2016 and became Deputy President of the British Computer Society in 2023.
We are delighted that Dr Sue Black OBE is opening TechSmart 2026 on 16 September at One Great George Street, Westminster. Full details of her keynote will be announced closer to the event.
Early bird rates offer a 20% discount on standard tickets until 31 July.
