The Road to Accountable AI

Artificial intelligence is changing business, and the world. How can you navigate through the hype to understand AI's true potential, and the ways it can be implemented effectively, responsibly, and safely? Wharton Professor and Chair of Legal Studies and Business Ethics Kevin Werbach has analyzed emerging technologies for thirty years, and created one of the first business school course on legal and ethical considerations of AI in 2016. He interviews the experts and executives building accountable AI systems in the real world, today.

Harish Peri (Okta): When the Thing Accessing Your Systems Has a Brain 06/25/2026

Harish Peri (Okta): When the Thing Accessing Your Systems Has a Brain 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 higher security bar. He argues that agents live at the application layer, where the real question is one of authorization: is this agent allowed to take this action or access this data, at this moment, on behalf of this user, given all available signals? Much of the conversation explores why a neutral, independent control plane separate from the frontier models and agent runtimes matters from a cybersecurity standpoint, spreading risk across multiple layers rather than concentrating it in one place. Peri notes that while awareness of rogue AI is universal, roughly 20% of agents carry about 80% of the risk. He distinguishes security threats like prompt injection and poisoned skill files from "intent mismatch," where an under-specified instruction such as "clean this up" gets read as "delete," and explains how coarse-grained limits, fine-grained context-based authorization, and selectively applied human-in-the-loop checks each play a role in agent governance. Harish Peri is the SVP and General Manager for AI Security at Okta, where he leads product, go-to-market, and commercial strategy for securing agentic AI. He has more than 20 years of experience across engineering, product management, marketing, and general management, spanning financial services, technology, and human capital management, with prior roles at Salesforce, ADP, and Proxyclick. He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/41616475

Logan Kelly (Waxell): The Accidental Agent Governance Company 06/18/2026

Nadav Cornberg (Eve Security): Interrogating Agents Before They Act 06/11/2026

Nadav Cornberg (Eve Security): Interrogating Agents Before They Act 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 deleted after the fact helps no one. With Eve's "interrogation" approach, when an agent attempts an anomalous, high-risk action, Eve's agent-in-the-loop pauses and questions it about its intent, before approving, blocking, or escalating to a human. Cornberg describes building a deterministic enforcement layer on top of inherently non-deterministic models, with the system minting explicit rules from observed behavior so that the large majority of everyday requests resolve deterministically. Ultimately, the consequenes are the same whether an unintended action originates in a prompt injection or a simple hallucination. On the perennial human-in-the-loop question, Cornberg argues that escalating everything would drown security teams as the agentic workforce scales, so the platform automatically handles lower-risk cases with justification and reserves human review for the genuinely critical. He closes predicting that "agentic security" will fragment into distinct segments much as endpoint, network, and cloud security once did, and that intent is fast becoming the field's organizing idea. Nadav Cornberg is the co-founder and CEO of Eve Security, an Austin-based agentic AI observability and policy-enforcement company whose platform governs how AI agents interact with an organization's most critical systems. He brings roughly two decades in product development and engineering, including an early decade in cybersecurity at RSA and Check Point and later work in physical access security across gaming and hospitality before returning to security for the agentic era. /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/41436595

Venkat Siva (Compfly): Governing Agents at the Execution Boundary 06/04/2026

Venkat Siva (Compfly): Governing Agents at the Execution Boundary 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 platforms built for fixed, deterministic workflows. Instead, control has to move to the "execution boundary" — the point where an agent's decision turns into a real-world action. And agent safety is much more than just model safety. In practical terms, Siva makes the case for giving every enterprise agent a distinct, cryptographically verifiable identity using decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials. He addresses the growing problem of "shadow agents," pointing to employees experimenting with powerful open-source autonomous tools inside enterprises, and explains discovery techniques like intercepting traffic to model APIs and watching for who requests LLM keys. He offers the concept of an "autonomy budget": classify actions by reversibility and financial, regulatory, and customer impact, so an agent might autonomously issue a small refund but require human approval for a large one. Drawing on his time at the electric automaker Rivian, Siva closes by contrasting recoverable digital failures with the irreversible stakes of agents embedded in physical systems, arguing that governance there must borrow from safety engineering. Venkat Siva is the co-founder and CEO of CompFly AI, an early-stage company building a control plane to discover, validate, secure, and govern autonomous agents from code to production. Before founding CompFly with Anand Salodkar, he spent more than two decades building enterprise platform products that help organizations adopt new technology safely and at scale, including work at the electric vehicle maker Rivian. (Compfly Manifesto) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/41436605

Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech): Conversational AI and Mental Health 05/28/2026

Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech): Conversational AI and Mental Health 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 through what researchers know, what they don't, and why the answers keep moving. The conversation centers on the difficulty of governing technologies whose capabilities and patterns of use are both changing every few weeks. De Choudhury invokes the cautionary tale of Google Flu Trends as a warning: any framework that assumes user behavior is fixed will eventually break. She argues that the harms and benefits of conversational AI are not just person-dependent but task-dependent, which makes general-purpose chatbots fundamentally harder to evaluate than the narrow medical AI systems researchers built for decades. She lays out a multi-stakeholder agenda to address AI's mental health risks, and argues that foundation models need to take into account principles from psychotherapy. Dr. Munmun De Choudhury is the J.Z. Liang Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where she founded and directs the Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab (SocWeB). She is one of the most cited researchers in digital mental health and is widely credited with pioneering the computational use of social media data to study mental health outcomes. She co-leads the Patient-Centered Care Delivery research pillar at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center, serves on the advisory board for the Australian government's eSafety panel, and was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy in 2024. Her honors include the 2023 SIGCHI Societal Impact Award and the 2021 ACM-W Rising Star Award. /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/41279700

Emre Kazim (Holistic AI): Why AI Governance is Like Cybersecurity 05/21/2026

Rumman Chowdhury (Humane Intelligence): The Need for Discernment 05/14/2026

Rumman Chowdhury (Humane Intelligence): The Need for Discernment 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 governance bodies that originally reviewed single AI implementations to hundreds of systems, third-party procurement questions, and agentic workloads. She describes the current evaluations market as immature on nearly every dimension, and explains why generic benchmarks rarely translate to enterprise contexts like insurance or auto manufacturing. The conversation then turns to AI's impact on work and education. Her concern is that companies pursuing short-term efficiency by cutting entry-level hiring will face what MIT researchers Caosun and Aral call the "augmentation trap," in which workers' cognitive skills atrophy while new workers never develop them. She offers "discernment" as her 2026 word of the year, discribing the skill -- more than just critical thinking -- we must cultivate and defend. Her new podcast and forthcoming book, Thinking About Thinking, argues that our notion of intelligence was built for an Industrial Revolution workforce we are now automating away. Dr. Rumman Chowdhury is the founder of Humane Intelligence PBC, building modular, tool-agnostic AI evaluation infrastructure for enterprise and real-world contexts. She co-founded the nonprofit Humane Intelligence in 2022 and served as its CEO until 2025. She previously was Director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability team at Twitter, founder of the algorithmic audit platform Parity, and Global Lead of Responsible AI at Accenture, where she built one of the first enterprise-level bias detection tools. She has served as U.S. Science Envoy for AI and as a Responsible AI Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and holds a doctorate in political science from the University of California, San Diego. (Transformer) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/41175220

Var Shankar: AI Governance for Smaller Organizations 05/07/2026

Var Shankar: AI Governance for Smaller Organizations 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, including an AI Governance Playbook organized around four focus areas: strategy, risk and compliance, workforce literacy, and operational management. He tells Kevin that the case for AI governance no longer needs to be made; what smaller organizations now need is help asking vendors the right questions and clarifying who owns what internally when a few people are doing many jobs. The conversation then turns to the parts of the field Var thinks are most undercooked. Workforce literacy, he argues, is the focus area most often neglected because it functions as a vitamin rather than a painkiller — long-term, hard to resource, and easy to reduce to a training module when what is actually needed is hands-on involvement in pilots and documentation. He explains why healthcare offers an unusually strong foundation for AI assurance, with its existing regulatory architecture, comfort with use-case variability, and tradition of post-deployment monitoring, and he describes assurance itself as the connective tissue between an organization and the outside world — distinct from regulation and from internal governance, not a substitute for either. Drawing on a pilot he co-authored on with the Standards Council of Canada testing system-level certification at a Canadian bank, he highlights two surprising lessons: that even simplified certification criteria get interpreted differently by different actors, and that even one of the world's most forward-thinking public standards bodies lacked the technical capacity to play standard-setter for something as dynamic as an AI system. He closes with practical advice for risk and compliance professionals: start with the positive vision of what the organization is trying to do with AI, observe how existing IT, data, and security governance already work, and identify which standards ecosystems the organization is already plugged into. Var Shankar is Executive Director of the Council on AI Governance, an independent nonprofit developing open AI governance resources for organizations of all sizes. He previously served as Executive Director of the Responsible AI Institute and as Chief AI and Privacy Officer at Enzai, a regtech AI compliance startup. An attorney by training and a graduate of Harvard Law School, he practiced law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and earlier worked on the Clinton Global Initiative and with the government of British Columbia on digital government and COVID response. He teaches AI governance at Purdue, where he has helped develop a master's-level AI auditing program, and serves on the OECD Network of Experts on AI, the World Economic Forum's AI Governance Alliance, and the Brookings Forum for Cooperation on AI. He co-developed Kaggle's Intro to AI Ethics course with Alexis Cook. (AI and Ethics, 2025) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/41060080

Katie Fowler (Thomson Reuters Foundation): How 3,000 Companies Approach AI Governance 04/30/2026

Katie Fowler (Thomson Reuters Foundation): How 3,000 Companies Approach AI Governance 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 dataset of roughly 3,000 companies across 13 sectors. Fowler unpacks the report's central finding: an enormous gap between corporate AI ambition and operational governance, with 44 percent of companies reporting an AI strategy but only 13 percent publicly committing to a formal governance framework. She argues that the gap is structural rather than just a disclosure failure, noting that AI expertise often sits deep within technical teams rather than at the leadership levels responsible for organization-wide rollout. She points to striking regional variation in workforce protections, the EU AI Act's emergence as a de facto global reference framework even outside Europe, and pushes back on the narrative that regulation stifles innovation. Looking forward, she discusses how investors are using transparency as a proxy for risk management in the absence of mature responsible AI metrics, and outlines the long-term vision of building a dataset robust enough to support a responsible AI index tied to financial materiality. Katie Fowler is Director of Responsible Business at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the independent charity affiliated with Thomson Reuters. She leads initiatives including the Workforce Disclosure Initiative (a global platform collecting survey data on how companies treat workers across their direct operations and supply chains) and the AI Company Data Initiative, launched in partnership with UNESCO. Before joining the Foundation, Fowler held leadership roles at The Social Innovation Partnership and Chance for Childhood. (Katie Fowler, techUK guest blog, 2025) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/40930025

Henry Ajder, Latent Space Advisory: Deepfakes and the Crisis of Digital Trust 04/23/2026

Henry Ajder, Latent Space Advisory: Deepfakes and the Crisis of Digital Trust 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 published the first comprehensive census of deepfakes in 2019. Ajder describes the current moment as one of "epistemic nihilism," where people cannot reliably distinguish real from synthetic content and the available technological responses are not yet at a level of categorical trust. He introduces a framework of "deception, doubt, and degradation" for understanding deepfake harms, and draws a distinction between the clearly malicious, the clearly beneficial, and a vast unsettling middle ground of uses that society has not yet figured out how to evaluate. On the response side, Ajder warns that media literacy advice is not just outdated but actively harmful, because it gives people false confidence in their ability to spot fakes. Detection tools, watermarking, and content provenance standards like C2PA, while valuable, each have real limitations. Ajder's practical advice for organizations centers on red-teaming, understanding what your tool is actually for and who it serves, and recognizing that authenticity is a strategic asset in a synthetic age. Henry Ajder is the founder of Latent Space Advisory and one of the world's foremost experts on deepfakes and generative AI. He authored the landmark 2019 State of Deepfakes report, and has since advised organizations including Meta, Adobe, the UK Government, the EU Commission, the US FTC, and the World Economic Forum. He co-leads the University of Cambridge's Generative AI in Business programme, and sits on Meta's Reality Labs Advisory Council. (2019) (BBC Radio 4 Documentary Series, 2022) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/40730000

Phil Dawson, Armilla AI: Insurance for AI Risks 04/16/2026

Phil Dawson, Armilla AI: Insurance for AI Risks 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 from AI testing platform assurance provider to, managing general agent for AI insurance policies, arguing that the company's AI audit experience gave it the risk data and evaluation capabilities needed to underwrite AI systems. A key turning point, he says, was realizing that as companies received reports showing how their models performed or underperformed, they became more concerned about risk, and insurance emerged as the next logical step to build trust. Dawson identifies the absence of claims data as the central challenge for AI underwriting, which forces insurers to rely on proxy signals. He argues that policymakers can help by incentivizing transparency, disclosure, and third-party assessment. Drawing on lessons from cyber insurance, Dawson contends that risk-based pricing must be grounded in system-level governance evaluation. He also describes Armilla's partnership program, which connects insured companies with AI governance platforms, auditing firms, and certification bodies, ultimately driving improved AI governance maturity across the sector. Philip Dawson is Head of AI Policy and Partnerships at Armilla AI, an MGA and Lloyd's cover holder that provides dedicated AI insurance products. A lawyer and public policy adviser, he has spent nearly a decade working on AI governance, including early involvement in the drafting of the OECD AI Principles and roles at Element AI, the United Nations, and the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. (Armilla AI and Lockton, February 2026) (Fintech Finance News, January 22, 2026) (Geneva Association, October 2, 2025) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/40728235

Walter Haydock, StackAware: In Search Of AI Governance Certification 04/09/2026

Richa Kaul, Complyance: Asking the Right Questions 04/02/2026

Michael Horowitz, UPenn: Governing AI That's Designed to Kill 03/26/2026

Tanvi Singh, Ekta AI: The Case for Sovereign AI 03/19/2026

Ray Eitel-Porter, Co-Author of Governing the Machine: The Confidence to Use AI 03/12/2026

Ray Eitel-Porter, Co-Author of Governing the Machine: The Confidence to Use AI 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. Drawing on his experience leading global data and AI programs, Eitel-Porter explains how the release of ChatGPT transformed enterprise attitudes toward AI, accelerating adoption while exposing risks such as hallucinations, reliability failures, and reputational harm. Effective governance has evolved from static principles to operational controls, including workflow checkpoints, red teaming, and technical guardrails, particularly for generative AI systems with inherently probabilistic outputs. On risk, he stresses that not all AI use cases require the same level of scrutiny; governance should scale with potential impact and harm, focusing on what an AI system is intended to do so that non-technical teams can surface high-risk use cases without incentives to downplay risk. On regulation, Eitel-Porter notes that despite uncertainty around the EU AI Act, many multinational companies are treating it as a global baseline, similar to GDPR, while contrasting this with more deregulatory signals from the United States and questioning the global influence of the UK’s middle-ground approach. He also shares insights from Governing the Machine, co-authored with Miriam Bogle and Paul Donkhan, emphasizing that AI governance is not a barrier to innovation but the foundation that allows organizations to deploy AI at scale with confidence and control. Ray Eitel-Porter is a Senior Advisor at Accenture and the former Global Lead for Responsible AI, where he designed and scaled AI governance programs for multinational organizations. He previously led Accenture’s data and AI practice in the UK and has over a decade of experience advising companies on responsible AI, data governance, and emerging technology risk. Eitel-Porter is the co-author of Governing the Machine: How to Navigate the Risks of AI and Unlock Its True Potential (Bloomsbury, 2025) and has led multi-year programs across public and private sectors, including global banks, retailers, and health brands. (Bloomsbury 2025) (AI Journal) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/39766915

Alexandru Voica: Responsible AI Video 12/18/2025

Alexandru Voica: Responsible AI Video 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 shape practical regulation. Voica acknowledges these safeguards have cost some business, but argues that for enterprise sales, trust is competitively essential. The company's content moderation has evolved from simple keyword detection to sophisticated LLM-based analysis, recently withstanding a rigorous public red team test organized by NIST and Humane Intelligence. Voica criticizes the EU AI Act's approach of regulating how AI systems are built rather than focusing on harmful outcomes, noting that smaller models can now match frontier capabilities while evading compute-threshold regulations. He points to the UK's outcome-focused approach—like criminalizing non-consensual deepfake pornography—as more effective. On adoption, Voica argues that AI companies should submit to rigorous third-party audits using ISO standards rather than publishing philosophical position papers—the thesis of his essay "Audits, Not Essays." The conversation closes personally: growing up in 1990s Romania with rare access to English tutoring, Voica sees AI-powered personalized education as a transformative opportunity to democratize learning. Alexandru Voica is the Head of Corporate Affairs and Policy at Synthesia, the UK's largest generative AI company and the world's leading AI video platform. He has worked in the technology industry for over 15 years, holding public affairs and engineering roles at Meta, NetEase, Ocado, and Arm. Voica holds an MSc in Computer Science from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies and serves as an advisor to MBZUAI, the world's first AI university. (Transformer) (Synthesia) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/39353320

Blake Hall: Safeguarding Identity in the AI Era 12/11/2025

Blake Hall: Safeguarding Identity in the AI Era 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 the security battleground to biometric and possession-based verification. Hall details how his company uses advanced techniques—like analyzing light refraction on skin versus screens—to detect deepfakes, while emphasizing a "best of breed" approach that relies on government-tested vendors. Beyond the threats, Hall outlines a positive vision for a digital wallet that functions as a user-controlled "digital twin," allowing individuals to share only necessary data (tokenized identity) rather than overexposing personal information. He argues that government agencies must play a stronger role in validating core identity attributes to stop synthetic fraud and suggests that future AI "agents" will rely on cryptographically signed credentials to act on our behalf securely. Ultimately, he advocates for a model where companies "sell trust, not data," empowering users to control their own digital identity across finance, healthcare, and government services. Blake Hall is the Co-Founder and CEO of ID.me, a digital identity network with over 150 million members that simplifies how individuals prove and share their identity online. A former U.S. Army Ranger, Hall led a reconnaissance platoon in Iraq and was awarded two Bronze Stars, including one for valor, before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School. He has been recognized as CEO of the Year by One World Identity and an Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young for his work in pioneering secure, user-centric digital identity solutions. (Inc., November 11, 2025) (ID.me) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/39349920

Mitch Kapor: AI Gap-Closing 12/04/2025

Mitch Kapor: AI Gap-Closing 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 downsides. Self-regulation by large AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic is likely to fail, he suggests, because incentives to aggregate power and wealth are too strong, requiring external pressure and oversight. Kapor explains that his responsible investing approach at his venture capital firm, Kapor Capital, focuses on gap-closing rather than diversity for its own sake, funding startups that address structural inequalities in access, opportunity, or outcomes, regardless of founder demographics. He discusses the Humanity AI initiative and argues that philanthropy needs to develop AI literacy and technical capacity, with some foundations hiring chief technology officers to effectively engage with these issues. He believes targeted interventions can create meaningful change without matching the massive investments of the major AI labs. Kapor expresses hope that a younger generation of leaders in tech and philanthropy can step up to make positive differences, emphasizing that his generation should empower them rather than occupying seats at the table. Mitch Kapor is a pioneering technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist who founded Lotus Development Corporation and created Lotus 1-2-3, the breakthrough spreadsheet software that helped establish the PC software industry in the 1980s. He co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation to advocate for digital rights and civil liberties, and later established Kapor Capital with his wife Freada Kapor Klein to invest in startups that close gaps of access, opportunity, and outcome for underrepresented communities. Kapor recently completed a masters degree at the MIT Sloan School focused on gap-closing investing, returning to finish what he started 45 years earlier when he left MIT to pursue his career in Silicon Valley. He serves on the steering committee of Humanity AI, a $500 million initiative to ensure AI benefits society broadly. /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/39127630

Brad Carson: Sharing AI's Bounty 11/20/2025

Oliver Patel: Sharing Frameworks for AI Governance 11/13/2025

Ravit Dotan: Rethinking AI Ethics 11/06/2025

Trey Causey: Is Responsible AI Failing? 10/30/2025

Caroline Louveaux: Trust is Mission Critical 10/23/2025

Caroline Louveaux: Trust is Mission Critical 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 privacy-by-design practices evolved into a single global AI governance framework aligned with the EU AI Act, NIST AI Risk Management, and standards. The conversation explores how Mastercard balances innovation speed with risk management, automates low-risk assessments, and maintains executive oversight through its AI Governance Council. Caroline also discusses the company’s work on agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents can initiate payments, and why trust, certification, and transparency are essential for such systems to succeed. Caroline unpacks what it takes for a global organization to innovate responsibly — from cross-functional governance and “tone from the top,” to partnerships like the Data & Trust Alliance and efforts to harmonize global standards. Caroline emphasizes that responsible AI is a shared responsibility and that companies that can “innovate fast, at scale, but also do so responsibly” will be the ones that thrive. Caroline Louveaux leads Mastercard’s global privacy and data responsibility strategy. She has been instrumental in building Mastercard’s AI governance framework and shaping global policy discussions on data and technology. She serves on the board of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), the WEF Task Force on Data Intermediaries, the ENISA Working Group on AI Cybersecurity, and the IEEE AI Systems Risk and Impact Executive Committee, among other activities. (Forbes 2024) (IMD, 2023) (Business Insider, July 2025) /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/38577525

Cameron Kerry: From Gridlock to Governance? 10/16/2025

Derek Leben: All of Us are Going to Become Ethicists 10/09/2025

Heather Domin: From Principles to Practice 10/02/2025

Dean Ball: The World is Going to Be Totally Different in 10 Years 09/25/2025

Dean Ball: The World is Going to Be Totally Different in 10 Years Kevin Werbach interviews Dean Ball, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and one of the key shapers of the Trump Administration's approach to AI policy. Ball reflects on his career path from writing and blogging to shaping federal policy, including his role as Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was the primary drafter of the Trump Administration's recent AI Action Plan. He explains how he has developed influence through a differentiated viewpoint: rejecting the notion that AI progress will plateau and emphasizing that transformative adoption is what will shape global competition. He critiques both the Biden administration’s “AI Bill of Rights” approach, which he views as symbolic and wasteful, and the European Union’s AI Act, which he argues imposes impossible compliance burdens on legacy software while failing to anticipate the generative AI revolution. By contrast, he describes the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan as focused on pragmatic measures under three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and international security. Looking forward, he stresses that U.S. competitiveness depends less on being first to frontier models than on enabling widespread deployment of AI across the economy and government. Finally, Ball frames tort liability as an inevitable and underappreciated force in AI governance, one that will challenge companies as AI systems move from providing information to taking actions on users’ behalf. Dean Ball is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, author of Hyperdimensional, and former Senior Policy Advisor at the White House OSTP. He has also held roles at the National Science Foundation, the Mercatus Center, and Fathom. His writing spans artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, bioengineering, infrastructure, public finance, and governance, with publications at institutions including Hoover, Carnegie, FAS, and American Compass. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zLLOkndlN2UYuQe-9ZvZNLhiD3e2TPZS/view /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/38344095

David Hardoon: You Can't Outsource Accountability 09/18/2025

Karine Perset: Building Bridges for Global AI Governance 09/11/2025

Karine Perset: Building Bridges for Global AI Governance Kevin Werbach interviews Karine Perset, Acting Head of the OECD’s AI and Emerging Technology Division, about the global effort to shape responsible AI. Perset explains how the OECD—an intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries—has become a central forum for governments to cooperate on complex, interdependent challenges like AI. Since launching its AI foresight forum in 2016, the OECD has spearheaded two cornerstone initiatives: the OECD Recommendation on AI, the first intergovernmental standard adopted in 2019, and OECD.AI, a policy observatory that tracks global trends, policies, and metrics. Perset highlights the organization’s unique role in convening evidence-based dialogue across governments, experts, and stakeholders worldwide. She describes the challenge of reconciling diverse national approaches while developing common tools, like a global incident-reporting framework and over 250 indicators that measure AI maturity across investment, research, infrastructure, and workforce skills. She underscores both the urgency and the opportunity: AI systems are diffusing rapidly across all sectors, powered by common algorithms that create shared risks. Without aligned safeguards and interoperable standards, countries risk repeating one another’s mistakes. Yet if governments can coordinate, share data responsibly, and support one another’s policy development, AI can strengthen economic resilience, innovation, and public trust. Karine Perset is the Acting Head of the OECD AI and Emerging Digital Technologies Division, where she oversees the OECD.AI Policy Observatory, the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) & integrated network of experts as well as the OECD Global Forum on Emerging Technologies. She oversees the development of analysis, policies and tools inline with the OECD AI Principles. She also helps governments manage the opportunities and challenges that AI and emerging technologies raise for governments. Previously she was Advisor to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee and Counsellor of the OECD’s Science, Technology and Industry Director. /episode/index/show/524f620b-2515-4e33-b87b-b9eef246c60d/id/38056775

The Road to Accountable AI

TOPICS