Guest profile

Art Abal

Art Abal is co-founder of Vana. Art is an expert in data systems, with a career dedicated to unlocking the value of human data across AI, governance, and global supply chains.
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Guest · Art Abal
Biography

About Art Abal

Art Abal is co-founder of Vana. Art is an expert in data systems, with a career dedicated to unlocking the value of human data across AI, governance, and global supply chains. He holds a Master in Public Policy from Harvard, where his research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs focused on human data collection in corporate supply chains. At Appen, one of the world’s largest providers of AI training data, Art led global impact data sourcing—managing a crowd of over 8 million contributors across 160+ countries. He helped design and operate data pipelines for some of the most widely used AI products in the world, including Google Search, Facebook Feed, and ChatGPT. His work focused on responsible data sourcing at massive scale, ensuring high-quality human signal for next-generation AI systems.
The archive

Featured podcasts

Michael Peres sits down with Art Abal, co-founder of Vana and a leading thinker at the intersection of data systems, AI, and governance. With experience ranging from advising the Prime Minister of Timor-Leste to running global data sourcing at Appen for products like Google Search, Facebook Feed, and ChatGPT, Art has spent his career figuring out how human data is collected, valued, and used – and what a fairer AI economy could look like. Now at Vana, he’s working on user-owned data networks that put people, not platforms, in control.
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