Karen is the Chief Data, Technology and Insight Officer at the UK’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA). The CMA is the UK’s principal consumer protection and competition agency, helping people, businesses and the UK economy by promoting competitive markets and tackling unfair behaviour. Karen is a member of the Senior Executive Team, an adviser to the Board, and oversees the CMA’s full portfolio of work related to data, technology and analytics including its programme on Artificial Intelligence. This includes analysis of emerging technologies, how these shape markets, and the implications and opportunities for consumers and competition, investment, innovation, and growth.

Karen has founded a new directorate at the CMA – Data, Technology, and Insight - which helps shape and support all areas of the CMA’s work, leveraging an exciting mix of complementary skillsets across data science, data engineering, technology, behavioural science, business and financial analysis, digital forensics and eDiscovery. Karen and her teams deliver technology horizon scanning, research, and expert advice and analysis across the CMA’s portfolio of investigations, including all major digital cases. They also drive key areas of CMA external engagement and cooperation in the technology and AI space, in the UK and internationally.  She and her team are currently also extending DTI’s capabilities into ‘strategic business analysis’ to bring a stronger business and investor lens into the CMA’s work in new and impactful ways. This will enable a more sophisticated and forward-looking approach to understanding how firms operate, compete, and scale in fast-moving markets – especially in AI and digital ecosystems. Finally, Karen’s remit includes leading the CMA’s overall digital transformation, harnessing data, technology, and AI across the breadth of its work and operations to drive effectiveness and efficiency. This includes new approaches to enable the detection at scale of issues such as bid-rigging in public procurement and infringements of consumer law, harnessing novel, large-scale data, analytics and AI.

Karen is a former Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and holds an Honorary Professorship of Economics at the University of Nottingham. Her wider experience includes:

  • Deputy Chief Economist at the Financial Conduct Authority, where she headed up the regulator’s scientific research programme, founded a new function integrating economics, behavioural science, and data science, and led analysis of digital markets and AI
  • Strategy consultant and data science/AI leader at McKinsey & Company (and QuantumBlack), advising private and public sector clients in Europe and the US across sectors including defence, financial services, advanced technologies, energy, consumer, health and pharmaceuticals. Topics included board-level strategy, operations, customer journey design, risk, and digital transformation.
  • Board member/advisor for select non-profits and academic programmes at the intersection of economics, technology and policy