Rt Hon George Osborne CH

George Osborne spent the first half of his career inside politics.

After studying Modern History at Oxford, he worked for the Conservative Party before being elected MP for Tatton in 2001. He became Shadow Chancellor in 2005 and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2010, serving until July 2016. From 2015, he also served as First Secretary of State.

Six years at the Treasury put him at the centre of decisions about taxation, public spending, financial policy, infrastructure and regional economic development. His tenure included the UK government’s programme of fiscal consolidation following the financial crisis and the development of the Northern Powerhouse agenda. The political and economic consequences of those policies remain debated, but the role gave Osborne direct experience of how governments make long-term choices about capital, institutions and economic strategy.

After leaving government, he moved repeatedly between worlds.

He became Editor of the Evening Standard, advised the BlackRock Investment Institute and joined boutique investment bank Robey Warshaw as a partner in 2021. When Robey Warshaw was acquired by Evercore in 2025, Osborne became a Senior Managing Director there before leaving to join OpenAI.

The new role brings him back into direct conversation with governments – but around a very different kind of infrastructure.

In January 2026, Osborne became Managing Director and Head of OpenAI for Countries. The programme works with national governments on areas including sovereign AI infrastructure, data centres, education, workforce skills, public services and the frameworks around the deployment of AI. OpenAI originally launched the initiative in 2025 as an international extension of its Stargate infrastructure programme; in 2026 it expanded the work into areas including education, health, cybersecurity, disaster preparedness and startup ecosystems.

For Osborne, the question is increasingly one of national capability: not simply whether governments have access to advanced AI, but whether their institutions, workforces and infrastructure are equipped to use it. In his first major report for OpenAI, he described the gap between what the technology can already do and the extent to which countries are actually using those capabilities as a “capability overhang”.

Alongside OpenAI, Osborne chairs the British Museum and Coinbase’s Global Advisory Council. At Stanford Graduate School of Business he is a Lecturer in Management and Dean’s Fellow, teaching high-stakes decision making.

He spent much of his political career deciding how a country should respond to economic change.

Now he is working with governments on how they respond to technological change.