My Story: Monica Maghami

by Monica Monica Maghami

The Sustainable Bridges I Didn’t Know I Was Building

I didn’t know I was building sustainable bridges. I just knew I had to keep building them guided by the power of factual knowledge and confirmations.

At the age of 12, I was teaching science, art, and spiritual education to children in need in a local orphanage and local neighbourhood, out of purity of thought after reading the area’s social reality. I didn’t yet have the words for justice, dignity, or empowerment. That experience, born from service and community, led me to consider to study Law. Not just to understand systems, but to apply them in practice.

Years later, as General Counsel in the UK and Ireland, and later advising global leading tech firms and Big Four consultancies, I found myself standing at the intersection of law, ethics, and innovation. I was honoured to be named among the world’s 100 Women in AI, but the real transformation had begun long before in my childhood and as a junior youth as those enriching experiences to serve gave me compass for life, while I still had to navigate winding roads but I then was certainly more equipped.

Whether drafting contracts or designing governance frameworks, I began to see legal tools fitting to build sustainable bridges, linking risk to resilience, policy to people. Living in rural Brazil, I witnessed women cultivating land and the power of irrigation through technology. That moment clarified something: innovation means nothing without inclusion. Technology should serve those underserved, especially at the margins.

Today, as AI reshapes our world, we face urgent risks:

environmental strains, cyberattacks, disinformation, and job displacement. But we also hold immense opportunities to use technology for the betterment of the world: to code values into systems, to embed equity into design, and to ensure that progress is not just fast, but fair.

So if you’re navigating uncertain ground, keep walking, relying on the forces of confirmations focused on the foundation of science and meaningful consultation. 

You may not see the sustainable bridge yet, but you could be building one that changes everything around you and others.