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PODCAST

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

technology

All Episodes

33:08

Sharon Goldman (Ground Level AI): AI as It Meets the...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/10/08

Kevin Werbach speaks with AI journalist Sharon Goldman about her new venture, Ground Level AI. Goldman describes taking on the AI beat at VentureBeat in 2022, months before ChatGPT launched, and then learning to translate technical developments for Fortune's broad business audience. She explains why she left to launch her own newsletter and podcast, focused on infrastructure, security, governance, policy, and the communities absorbing AI's effects. Goldman shares her reporting from data center

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36:39

Robert Levitan (Ethical Tech Project): Unlimited...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/10/01

Kevin Werbach speaks with Robert Levitan, Chair of the Ethical Tech Project, about what the early internet can teach companies deploying AI today. Levitan, who helped build iVillage and Flooz.com in the dot-com era, argues that the central lesson of those years is that new technologies always carry unintended consequences. Moving fast and breaking things is untenable, he says, now that AI sits on top of the internet and mobile. Levitan explains his essay comparing a coming AI disaster to the 1911

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33:22

Harish Peri (Okta): When the Thing Accessing Your...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/06/25

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

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33:22

Logan Kelly (Waxell): The Accidental Agent Governance...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/06/18

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 addressed the problems effectively, the team built a control plane for agents, which became the foundation

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32:38

Nadav Cornberg (Eve Security): Interrogating Agents...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/06/11

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

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33:13

Venkat Siva (Compfly): Governing Agents at the...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/06/04

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

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31:46

Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech): Conversational AI...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/05/28

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

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32:46

Emre Kazim (Holistic AI): Why AI Governance is Life...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/05/21

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 and propagate across industry, rather than descending from abstract regulatory frameworks. Kazim

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35:34

Rumman Chowdhury (Humane Intelligence): The Need for...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/05/14

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

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29:03

Var Shankar: AI Governance for Smaller Organizations

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/05/07

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,

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37:40

Katie Fowler (Thompson Reuters Foundation): How 3,000...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/04/30

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

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38:45

Henry Ajder, Latent Space Advisory: Deepfakes and the...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/04/23

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

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30:12

Phil Dawson, Armilla AI: Insurance for AI Risks

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/04/16

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,

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32:49

Walter Haydock, StackAware: In Search Of AI...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/04/09

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 and which his own firm has gone through. He draws a three-part taxonomy of AI governance frameworks:

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33:00

Richa Kaul, Complyance: Asking the Right Questions

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/04/02

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' models, and what specific steps reduce hallucination. She suggests that market-driven security standards

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33:45

Michael Horowitz, UPenn: Governing AI That's Designed...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/03/26

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 World House at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the world's leading experts on military AI

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33:09

Tanvi Singh, Ekta AI: The Case for Sovereign AI

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/03/19

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 that an organization's AI reflects its own values, laws, and culture. Whlile frontier LLMs will

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32:59

Ray Eitel-Porter, Co-Author of Governing the Machine:...

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2026/03/12

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

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38:23

Alexandru Voica: Responsible AI Video

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2025/12/18

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

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33:54

Blake Hall: Safeguarding Identity in the AI Era

The Road to Accountable AI ·

2025/12/11

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

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