Jacky Wright

Jacky Wright is Senior Partner and Chief Technology and Platform Officer at McKinsey & Company, one of the most senior technology leadership roles in global professional services. She is the former Chief Digital Officer and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, and previously served as Chief Digital and Information Officer at HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) on a two-year loan arrangement from Microsoft from 2017 to 2019, a rare sitting-executive secondment into UK government digital leadership. Born in London to Jamaican parents and raised in Tottenham through the Broadwater Farm era, she moved to the United States as a teenager when her father, previously in the Royal Air Force in the UK, decided the US offered more visible Black role models. Her career has spanned BP, General Electric, Andersen Consulting and Microsoft. Her first CIO appointment came at GE under a Black CEO she credits explicitly as a mentor and sponsor, the originating data point of her lifelong "if you can see it, you can be it" philosophy. Her public-record distinction is unusual: Powerlist #6 in 2018, #4 in 2019 and 2020, and #1 in 2022, the United Kingdom's most influential Black person, succeeding Lewis Hamilton. She was one of seven guest editors of BBC Radio 4's Today programme over Christmas 2021 and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath (2022) for services to technology and digital inclusion. She has served on the boards of Year Up and the Women's Innovation Council, and she has consistently foregrounded the Accelerate initiative, reskilling pipelines between government, private sector and academia, as the programmatic core of her influence. Her Off The Agenda appearance, hosted by Sir Charles Bowman in the City of London, is the corpus's most concentrated reading on ethical digital transformation at global scale: privacy as a fundamental human right, security through zero-trust, accessibility as a product requirement, and ethical AI as the governing frame for the convergence of the physical and virtual worlds. This profile is an analyst-rated Leadership Index draft produced under the methodology introduced in Version 4.0 of the AI Future-Proofing Strategy.