Technology Executive – Former Parliamentarian – Crisis Leader
About
Gísli Rafn Ólafsson is a technology executive, former parliamentarian, and crisis leader who has spent three decades at the intersection of technology, institutions, and pressure. He now advises senior leaders at the point where artificial intelligence meets the institutions they are accountable for, and writes and speaks from the same vantage.
His career began at Microsoft in the late nineteen-nineties, where he held product and advisory roles through 2010, working alongside United Nations agencies during the Swine Flu pandemic and the Haiti earthquake. From 2010 to 2015, he served as Emergency Response Director at NetHope, leading the global deployment of connectivity across more than three hundred humanitarian locations during the West African Ebola outbreak, the Syrian refugee response, and the Nepal earthquake. He was Chief Technology Officer at One Acre Fund from 2019 to 2021, leading digital transformation across an organization serving 1.2 million smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. He served as a Member of the Icelandic Parliament from 2021 to 2024, as Deputy Speaker and as Deputy Chair of the Industries Committee and the Economic Affairs and Trade Committee, and was Secretary General of the Icelandic Red Cross from 2025 to 2026.
He is the author of The Crisis Leader, The Motivated Leader, and The AI Fluent Leader, a trilogy written over fifteen years on leadership under pressure. He founded Gridland Consulting in 2026 as the vehicle for his advisory practice and writes regularly for senior executives, boards, and institutional audiences on AI, leadership, and resilience.
He lives in Iceland and works with clients across Europe and North America, as well as with international institutions based in Geneva, New York, and Washington.
AI does not replace leaders. It exposes them.
Artificial intelligence does not create most of the institutional problems it reveals — weak strategy, thin governance, neglected data, untested capability, cultures that cannot metabolize change. It reveals them. The work is leadership work, carried out in an AI-era context.
Resilience is a strategic advantage.
Resilience is not a back-office discipline, a compliance category, or a cost center. Institutions that have built the capacity to absorb shock, learn quickly, and continue operating through disruption hold a measurable advantage over those that have not.
Leadership is responsibility, not authority.
Authority is what the chart confers. Responsibility is what a leader accepts when a decision and its consequences are genuinely theirs. The leaders who will matter most in the AI era are those who have learned to take accountability without hiding behind their position.
Composed courage is a defining capability.
Composed courage is the capacity to remain calm, clear, and humane under genuine pressure. It is cultivated rather than summoned, and it is the operating stance that the AI era will reward long before it rewards any particular strategy.
Selected Roles
Senior counsel on AI, leadership, and resilience for boards and executive teams.
National leadership of one of Iceland’s largest civil society institutions in a rapidly changing sector.
Deputy Speaker, Deputy Chair of the Industries Committee, and the Economic Affairs and Trade Committee.
Digital transformation across an organization serving 1.2 million smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.
Digital transformation of the oldest investment bank in the Nordics. CEO of US operations.
Global connectivity and technology deployments during crises worldwide, including the West African Ebola outbreak, the Syrian Refugee crisis, and the Nepal earthquake.
Product and advisory roles, alongside UN agencies, during the Swine Flu pandemic and the Haiti earthquake.
Gridland Consulting
Gridland is the vehicle for my advisory practice. It is a small, senior practice that helps boards and executive teams meet what artificial intelligence is exposing in their institutions, through structured readiness assessments, ongoing fractional and advisory engagements, and targeted instruments that resolve specific frictions. Engagements are small by design, senior throughout, and oriented around judgment rather than volume of deliverables.
Visit Gridland Consulting →
Gísli Rafn Ólafsson
Leadership for the age of disruption. Essays, books, and keynotes on artificial intelligence, leadership, and resilience. Written and delivered from Reykjavik, read, presented, and heard internationally.
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