The founding observation.
"I looked for the standard that said how you create a digital representation of a real person ethically. It didn't exist. So we built it."
— Bobbie-Jane Skewes, Co-Founder & CEOBobbie-Jane Skewes spent over two decades in luxury hospitality — pre-opening resorts across Southeast Asia, leading commercial teams across nine countries, protecting the identity and integrity of some of the world's most prestigious brands. In that world, brand standards were not optional. They existed to protect everyone in the relationship.
Then she began working with an AI digital twin company — and discovered that the standards she had taken for granted simply did not exist in this space.
Her co-founder Bradley Gaylard had spent 13 years in edtech — building structured educational frameworks at national scale in Australia. When Bobbie-Jane described what she was seeing, he immediately recognised the problem: a field that had outpaced its governance, and needed a framework rigorous enough to be authoritative but practical enough to actually be used.
Together, they built DPIF.
The handover of completed digital twins had no governance process. No consent documentation. No defined use boundaries. No accountability if something went wrong. No plan for what happened to the twin when the relationship ended.
The question that followed was direct: how do you protect the person on the other side of this process?
There was no answer — because there was no standard. So Bobbie-Jane and Bradley built one.
When a person's face, voice, and communicative presence can be replicated and operated at scale, the question is no longer whether the technology is impressive. The question is whether the person behind the representation retains any meaningful control over their own identity.
Two disciplines. One shared conviction.
A luxury hospitality executive with 20 years protecting identity at the highest level — and an edtech creative director with 13 years building frameworks that work in practice. The combination covered every dimension the framework required — domain authority, structural rigour, and deployment-level practicality.
Bobbie-Jane Skewes is one of Asia-Pacific's most experienced luxury hospitality executives — with over two decades leading pre-openings, rebrands, and commercial strategy for some of the world's most prestigious properties across Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
She has built sales and marketing departments from the ground up for Rosewood Hotels in Vietnam, led cluster commercial strategy for Anantara in Thailand, directed six-hotel startups simultaneously across Southeast Asia, and most recently served as General Manager of Selong Selo Resort and Residences in Indonesia — a 40-villa ultra-luxury property in South Lombok.
That career gave her one profound expertise: understanding what it means to protect the authentic identity of something — or someone — that the world is watching. In luxury hospitality, brand standards exist precisely because identity is precious and reputation is fragile.
"When I started working with AI digital twin technology, I saw exactly what I had spent 20 years working to prevent — people's identities being represented without proper standards, without transparency, without anyone accountable. I knew what a governance standard looked like. And I knew nobody had built one for this."
Bobbie-Jane leads client relationships, the certification business, and the strategic positioning of DPIF as the defining standard in AI identity governance globally.
Bradley Gaylard brings 13 years of experience building structured educational frameworks, content systems, and creative architecture for national-scale audiences — as Creative Director and Director of Publishing in the Australian edtech sector.
That edtech background is directly relevant to DPIF: building frameworks that are rigorous enough to be authoritative, clear enough to be usable, and structured enough to be assessable. DPIF is not a policy document — it is a functional governance system. Bradley is the reason it works that way.
"A framework is only as good as its structure. DPIF had to be something practitioners could actually use — not another whitepaper that describes a problem without giving anyone the tools to address it. That was the same challenge I'd spent 13 years solving in education."
Bradley leads framework development, the product architecture of The Presence AI platform, and the technical governance infrastructure behind the DPIF certification ecosystem.
The technology is here.
The governance is not.
AI avatars, voice clones, and digital twins are being deployed at scale across enterprise, media, healthcare, and finance. Real people's identities are being replicated at scale with minimal oversight, no documented consent, and no audit trail when something goes wrong.
Existing regulation does not address the specific governance needs of digital representations of real people. The EU AI Act is a start — but it does not go far enough. That gap is what DPIF fills.
The Presence Authority is the only organisation in the world that publishes and certifies against a standard specifically designed for this problem.
External governance and independent expertise.
The Presence Authority is assembling an independent advisory board to provide external scrutiny, domain expertise, and institutional oversight of DPIF and its governance processes.
Advisors are being recruited with expertise in data protection law, AI governance, digital identity standards, and regulated sector deployment. Board members provide independent oversight of framework development — not commercial endorsement. Appointments will be announced publicly on this page as confirmed.
If you have relevant expertise and an interest in contributing to an open governance standard for AI-mediated digital representations, express your interest via the contact form.
The Presence Authority is privately held and vendor-neutral. DPIF is authored by its co-founders, published under CC BY 4.0, and maintained under no commercial influence from AI platform operators, technology vendors, or certification candidates. The organisation generates no revenue from organisations whose deployments it assesses — certification and advisory income is structurally separate from the standard itself. The full framework record is version-controlled and publicly auditable on GitHub.
DPIF is published under CC BY 4.0 — free to read, free to reference, free to build on. The Presence Authority exists not to own the standard, but to maintain its integrity and certify those who meet it.