The Road to Accountable AI

In the final episode of our series on governing AI agents, Kevin Werbach speaks with Harish Peri, SVP and General Manager for AI Security at Okta. Peri frames agent governance as the natural next chapter of what Okta has done for two decades: standing in the middle of people accessing technology. The twist is that the new "software" is a non-deterministic agent with a brain, which imposes a much h...

Logan Kelly never set out to build an AI governance solution. Waxell spun out of CallSine, an AI-native sales engagement platform, when the team realized that agents that could act on their own produced a cascade of problems: burning through tokens, accessing databases, creating data-quality issues, and generally doing things no one had explicitly approved. Unable to find existing tooling that add...

Kevin Werbach speaks with Nadav Cornberg, co-founder and CEO of Eve Security, about securing agentic AI where it counts: at the moment an agent actually does something. He recounts how customers upended his own assumptions that AI agent security should focus on visibility and after-the-fact detection. Buyers insisted on runtime enforcement first, reasoning that learning a production database was d...

Kevin Werbach speaks with Venkat Siva, co-founder and CEO of CompFly AI, about why governing autonomous agents requires a fundamentally different approach than securing traditional software. Siva argues that agents create a genuinely new control problem. Because they decide at runtime which tools to call and which actions to take, governance cannot simply be bolted onto existing MLOps or security...

Conversational AI is increasingly being used as a source of emotional support, even though general-purpose chatbots were never designed for that purpose. Concerns about AI's mental health impact, up to and including suicides, have moved onto the public policy agenda. Munmun De Choudhury, who has been studying the intersection of digital technology and mental health longer than almost anyone, walks...

Holistic AI was one of the first companies built specifically to govern, audit, and red team AI systems. As co-founder and co-CEO Emre Kazim explains, its original thesis was that AI governance would mirror data governance: a compliance-driven regime. He now believes the better analogy is cybersecurity: a more technical, incident-driven discipline where best practices emerge from real-world events...

Kevin Werbach speaks with long-time responsible AI leader Rumman Chowdhury the current environment, in which substantive standards and oversight efforts for AI are taking shape amid a larger anti-regulation wave. Chowdhury distinguishes sharply between frontier labs, where the posture is largely "AI at all costs," and the non-tech enterprises she works with, who are wrestling with how to scale gov...

Var Shankar makes the case that most AI governance guidance is built for large, sophisticated, multifunctional global enterprises — and that this leaves out the roughly half of American workers employed at organizations with fewer than 500 people. Through the Council on AI Governance, the nonprofit he leads with Alexis Cook, he is trying to fill that gap with open, current, and pragmatic resources...

Good data about how companies are implementing AI governance programs is essential both for organizations to benchmark their efforts, and for observers to understand the state of development. In this episode, Katie Fowler, Director of Responsible Business at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, joins Kevin Werbach to discuss the findings of  Responsible AI in Practice , a new report drawing on a global...

AI-generated deepfakes are exploding in volume and quality, posing frightening challenges for public discourse, security, safety, and more. My guest, Henry Ajder, has been mapping the deepfake landscape since before most people had heard the term. In this conversation, he describes the dramatic changes in realism, efficiency, accessibility, and functionality of synthetic media tools since he publi...

Could a private insurance market play a significant role in compensating for AI-related harms and incentivizing companies to engage in more effective AI governance? Phil Dawson of Armillla AI explains why AI insurance is emerging as a distinct product category, why traditional policies aren't effective at addressing AI risks, and what AI insurance actually covers. Dawson details Armilla's journey...

Walter Haydock draws a direct line from military risk management to the enterprise AI challenge. His argues that organizations need to stop doing "math with colors," and move toward quantitative assessment that assigns dollar values to potential AI failures. Much of the conversation in this episode focuses on ISO 42001, the global standard for AI management systems, which Haydock has championed an...

Richa Kaul breaks down the AI risk landscape for enterprises, and argues that the key to managing all of them is resisting the urge to sensationalize. Kaul offers a candid assessment of where enterprise AI governance committees are falling short, noting that many  lack the technical fluency to ask vendors the right questions, such as where customer data goes, whether it trains other clients' model...

How AI is, could, and shouldn't be used in military and other national security contexts is a topic of growing importance. Recent conflicts on the battlefield, and between the U.S. military and a major AI lab, are forcing conversations about legal, ethical, and appropriate business limitations for increasingly powerful AI tools. Michael Horowitz, a Political Science professor and Director of Perry...

Tanvi Singh draws on over two decades of building and governing AI systems inside global banks to make a provocative case: you cannot be accountable for decisions you do not control. Enterprises are consuming intelligence through models they don't own, can't explain, and didn't train. Singh reframes sovereignty beyond data center locations and infrastructure, to control across the entire stack, so...

Ray Eitel-Porter, former Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture and co-author of the new book, Governing the Machine, discusses how enterprises can move from abstract AI principles to practical governance. He emphasizes that organizations can only realize AI's benefits if responsibility is embedded into everyday business processes rather than treated as a standalone compliance exercise. Drawi...

Alexandru Voica, Head of Corporate Affairs and Policy at Synthesia, discusses how the world's largest enterprise AI video platform has approached trust and safety from day one. He explains Synthesia's "three C's" framework—consent, control, and collaboration: never creating digital replicas without explicit permission, moderating every video before rendering, and engaging with policymakers to shap...

In this episode, Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, discusses the massive escalation in online fraud driven by generative AI, noting that attacks have evolved from "Nigerian prince" scams to sophisticated, scalable social engineering campaigns that threaten even the most digital-savvy users. He explains that traditional knowledge-based verification methods are now obsolete due to data breaches, shifting th...

Legendary entrepreneur and investor Mitch Kapor draws on his decades of experience to argue that while AI represents a massive wave of disruptive innovation, it also represents an opportunity to avoid mistakes made with social media and the early internet. In this episode, he contends that technologists tend toward over-optimism about technology solving human problems while underestimating downsid...

Former Congressman and Pentagon official Brad Carson discusses his organization, Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), which seeks to bridge the gap between immediate AI harms like and catastrophic safety risks, while bringing deep Capitol Hill expertise to the AI conversation . He argues that unlike previous innovations such as electricity or the automobile, AI has been deeply unpopular wit...

Oliver Patel has built a sizeable online following for his social media posts and Substack about enterprise AI governance, using clever acronyms and visual frameworks to distill down insights based on his experience at AstraZeneca, a major global pharmaceutical company. In this episode, he details his career journey from academic theory to government policy and now practical application, and offer...

Ravit Dotan argues that the primary barrier to accountable AI is not a lack of ethical clarity, but organizational roadblocks. While companies often understand what they should do, the real challenge is organizational dynamics that prevent execution—AI ethics has been shunted into separate teams lacking power and resources, with incentive structures that discourage engineers from raising concerns....

Kevin Werbach speaks with Trey Causey about the precarious state of the responsible AI (RAI) field. Causey argues  that while the mission is critical, the current organizational structures for many RAI teams are struggling. He highlights a fundamental conflict between business objectives and governance intentions, compounded by the fact that RAI teams' successes (preventing harm) are often invisib...

Kevin Werbach speaks with  Caroline Louveaux , Chief Privacy, AI, and Data Responsibility Officer at Mastercard, about what it means to make trust mission critical in the age of artificial intelligence. Caroline shares how Mastercard built its AI governance program long before the current AI boom, grounding it in the company's Data and Technology Responsibility Principles" . She explains how priva...

Cameron Kerry, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Acting US Secretary of Commerce, joins Kevin Werbach to explore the evolving landscape of AI governance, privacy, and global coordination. Kerry emphasizes the need for  agile and networked approaches to AI regulation that reflect the technology's decentralized nature. He argues that effective oversight must be fl...