Said Saillant
- Executive Director - Societas Sapiens, Inc.
Said Saillant works on AI governance and industrial policy, focusing on institutional design for general-purpose AI and the regulatory coordination problems it triggers across an economy.
He contributes to UNIDO’s Innovation Lab on a consulting basis, supporting work on AI for industry, adaptive regulation, and diffusion pathways that keep safety and deployment speed aligned. In December 2025, UNIDO’s Directorate of Technical Cooperation and Sustainable Industrial Development granted him an Innovation Award for supporting the 2030 Agenda through sustainable and inclusive industrial development.
At the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI), he developed the concept of AI-ready special economic zones (AI-SEZs) for Latin American countries and designed regulatory sandbox approaches aimed at accelerating safe AI diffusion in the United Kingdom. AI Policy Perspectives later highlighted this work in its AI Policy Primer (#22); the Substack is organised by Google DeepMind’s policy team, with contributors writing in a personal capacity.
His current work clusters around two institutional prototypes: (1) AI-SEZs, dedicated areas that combine compute access, clear data rules, talent pipelines, and testing capacity to accelerate local AI capability; and (2) cross-economy regulatory sandboxes, joint, time-limited pilots where regulators agree up front on goals and stop-rules to scale safer products faster without weakening oversight.
In the Dominican Republic, he has contributed to legislative drafting and related institutional design work on AI governance. Revista Mercado, a leading Dominican business and finance magazine, named him to its “40 Under 40” 2025 list for leadership in national AI governance. He earned a PhD in Philosophy at MIT and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
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