Dr Jacki O’Neill is the founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi. An ethnographer by trade, she is passionate about designing technologies that enhance, rather than remove, agency and create sustainable futures. She brings this passion to Microsoft Research Africa, where she leads a multidisciplinary team, combining research, engineering, and design to pursue an ambitious research agenda aimed at building more equitable AI. This involves building culturally and linguistically sensitive AI tools and platforms, which requires foundational innovation in NLP and African languages, resource-constrained computing, generative models, and human-computer interaction (HCI). We will only be able to achieve this by developing and deploying new practices of Human-Centred AI (HCAI) to build better AI models, technologies, and interactions. Over her career, Dr Jacki has led major research projects in AI, the future of work, financial inclusion, and global healthcare. She has >50 peer-reviewed articles, two innovation awards, and 16 patents.