Lucy Calcott

Strategist working on AI deployment, foresight and institutional readiness.

I'm Lucy. I work in the Office of the COO & Chief AI Readiness Officer at Google DeepMind on strategy and special projects. I build internal deployment tools, including scenario-planning models that help partners, governments, and higher-education institutions map the consequences of strategy choices and decisions across systems and plan under uncertainty.

This year, I'm also co-founding The Good Society Forum, a leadership community that grew out of the Yale World Fellows network, convening senior leaders across civil society, government, academia, and industry to build the judgement their institutions need for increasingly capable AI.

I grew up in the Waterberg in northern South Africa, near the Botswana border, sixth generation on that land. At twelve I founded Pine View School, a Saturday programme that grew to 90 students by the time I graduated high school, on a curriculum I wrote and R40,000 I raised — close to the average annual household income in Limpopo at the time. At nineteen I needed to fund my teacher-training course in Prague, so I cycled solo through Botswana's big-five wilderness, the Thuli Block, to raise the money. When home internet in my area became good enough in my late teens, I taught myself everything I could reach. Two years after finishing school, when someone told us American universities could give full scholarships, my sister and I crammed for the SATs on Khan Academy, sat an exam we had never heard of a few months earlier, and both won full rides. Technology was the unlock, and building that same unlock for others has driven everything since.

Children seated at desks in Pine View School's first classroom, walls decorated with mathematics and English posters
Pine View School, 2012 — our first building, with chairs and tables donated by a nearby high school and books funded through grants, for that year's 30-student cohort.

I studied Global Affairs at Yale (BSc '25). While there, I led a 13-person team advising Haiti's Transitional Presidential Council on gang-violence reduction strategy, won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant and used it to run ReTsoga — six educator-training conferences across Limpopo with South Africa's Department of Basic Education, reaching 1,000+ educators and parents — published peer-reviewed research on early-childhood policy at the Yale Child Study Center, analysed micro-credit rollouts for CGAP at Dalberg in Mumbai, and founded the Jackson School's first undergraduate council.

A large hall filled with educators, parents, and young children at a ReTsoga conference in Limpopo
A ReTsoga parent–educator conference, Limpopo.

Thoughts

Short pieces I'm working through, published on Substack.

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Talks

I speak on AI readiness, foresight, and the future of skills. A fuller list is on its way — in the meantime, do get in touch.

Lucy Calcott presenting a slide titled Bounded Scenario Mapping to a seated audience
Giving a talk on bounded scenario mapping — using systems, trade-off, and correlation mapping to plan under uncertainty.
Lucy Calcott speaking on stage to a full auditorium at a policymaker conference in South Africa
Speaking on foresight and the future of skills at a policymaker conference, South Africa.