Barclay Blair

As Sr. Managing Director of AKD Partners's AI Innovation Team, Barclay advises both the firm and its clients on the applications of artificial intelligence while driving the innovative use of emerging technologies. Barclay is a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies, software and hardware vendors, and government institutions, and is an author, speaker, and internationally recognized authority on the broad range of issues that emerge at the intersection of law, technology, and business. Barclay is an award-winning author.

Barclay has led several high-profile consulting engagements at the world's leading institutions to help them globally transform the way they manage information. He is the founder and president of ViaLumina LLC and the founder and executive director of the Information Governance Initiative.

Barclay is the award-winning author of the books Information Nation: Seven Keys to Information Management Compliance, Information Nation Warrior, and Privacy Nation; and has contributed to and edited dozens of additional books and publications including: eDiscovery for Corporate Counsel, Safeguarding Critical E-Documents, Email Rules, Secure Electronic Commerce, and Professional XML.

Barclay speaks internationally and has instructed at George Washington University. He has presented to industry groups such as the American Bar Association, the American Council of Life Insurers, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Options Clearing Corporation, the BNA Litigation Forum, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ARMA International, AIIM International, the Society of Quality Assurance, the MER Conference, and many others.

Barclay led a best practices project for the Financial Services Roundtable, led an international standards group on cloud computing, and is frequently interviewed by media outlets on issues relevant to his expertise. In 2013, Barclay was granted an Extraordinary Ability EB-1 green card (the so-called "Einstein Visa") by the U.S. federal government.

Barclay's notable recent work includes working with enterprises to design custom AI solutions, with a particular focus on creatively utilizing prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation to increase the usefulness and veracity of LLM outputs. Barclay has also spoken about responsible use of AI models and enhancement techniques (e.g. prompt engineering) to ensure alignment with organizations' goals and values.

Barclay is not a lawyer.