SHIELD Institute Co-Founder and CEO
Yoav Evenstein
Yoav Evenstein has spent the past decade making AI safe to use—in the rooms where the rules are written and inside the organizations that must live by them. He is one of the few people fluent at every altitude of that challenge: he speaks engineering with engineers, strategy with CEOs, and governance with boards—connecting research, development, standards and regulation into one working system.
An engineer by training at the Technion, he has been building intelligence and intelligent systems since 2005—including simulators, VR trainers and computer-vision applications—before adding an MBA cum laude from Tel Aviv University and AI studies at MIT Sloan & CSAIL. At Tel Aviv University’s technology-transfer company, and later as GM of Industry Collaborations at TAU’s AI Research Center, he transformed breakthroughs into products.
Since 2018, he has been Israel’s Head of Delegation to ISO/IEC SC42 and among the founders of the global “Trustworthiness of AI” agenda. He is the only Israeli expert in CEN/CENELEC JTC21 writing standards for the EU AI Act; Co-Chair of the OECD.AI Index Expert Group; an invited expert to US NIST and the Standards Council of Canada; and a contributor to UN/UNECE and WTO work on AI standards and global trade.
A certified Lead Auditor for ISO/IEC 42001 and 27001, he authored Israel’s AI governance framework for boards (IDU, 2024) and teaches the AI module for directors at Reichman University and executives at Lahav, Tel Aviv University.
