The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast

Eva Simone Lihotzky
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

The podcast explores how we build, break, and rebuild trust in a world shaped by accelerating technology and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics expert with 12+ years of experience in tech, the podcast creates in-depth conversations at the intersection of AI, business, ethics, and human connection. Through various lenses - across business, politics, neuroscience, tech and systems thinking in organizations - it hosts expert conversations for you to deep dives into one of the complex topics we need to solve as a society and beyond.

  1. 3d ago

    Captured or AI Created? Tech Ethics of Photography - Noah Wetzel (EP 40)

    🎙️ Noah Wetzel, Photographer What happens to AI trust when the most real photographs are the ones people refuse to believe? Noah Wetzel spent nine months and 600 hours preparing to capture 84 seconds of a total solar eclipse - then had to prove the result came out of a camera. This one is for anyone whose genuine work now meets default suspicion, and anyone deciding where AI belongs in a craft that has to stay real. 🎧 Episode overview Noah captured a wingsuit athlete flying through totality in Spain: flashes triggered from a mile away, a subject moving at 150 miles per hour, two frames per athlete, no second takes. The conversation follows what came after the shutter - viewers at his own shows assuming the work is fake, magazine editors auditing every edit in his raw files, and a disclaimer on Instagram stating his photos are camera-captured. He is blunt about his own AI use: hundreds of hours on ChatGPT planning the shot, AI saving him days in processing, and a hard line at the frame itself. Where that line sits, and whether it survives cameras that can generate content on demand, stays open until the end. 🔍 Key themes Why extraordinary authentic images now read as fake by default, and who ends up carrying the burden of proofWhere AI strengthens a craft and where it disqualifies the result - the captured versus created distinction Noah refuses to blurWhat "the ethics of photography" means when every edit is contestable and everyone draws the line differentlyWhat happens to that line when the camera itself can add what was never thereHow you perform inside 84 seconds when preparation is the only thing left to trust 📸 About the guest Noah Wetzel is an adventure and action-sports photographer, and the person behind what may be the most complex photograph ever attempted: a Red Bull Air Force wingsuit athlete crossing a total solar eclipse. The detail that matters for this episode is what he does after the work is done - he attaches a statement to his published images confirming they were captured by a camera, because the audience's default assumption has flipped. He argues the case for craftsmanship from inside a working life that uses AI daily. ⏱ Chapters [00:00] 600 hours for 84 seconds[04:33] Trusting preparation when nothing can be paused[16:30] What generative AI changes about believing a photograph[24:02] Why real work now carries a disclaimer[31:41] Where the in-camera line starts to dissolve 🔗 Links Noah Wetzel's website / portfolio — ⁠www.wetzelgallery.com⁠Noah Wetzel on Instagram, ⁠www.instagram.com/noahwetzel⁠Noah Wetzel on Facebook: ⁠www.facebook.com/noahwetzelphoto⁠[LINK: Related episode — suggest a Pillar 1 episode on trust in AI systems, Eva to match to episode number]Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/Documentary Released on PBS Recently - April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse in Hill Country Texas. The film has received 17 film festival awards and been aired 1700+ times in the last month across 39 different states in the United States. You can watch the documentary online here:https://www.pbs.org/show/eclipse-outlaw-chase/

    Captured or AI Created? Tech Ethics of Photography - Noah Wetzel (EP 40)

  2. Sep 3

    AI and Sustainability: Lessons from Both Transformations - Dr. Kiri Trier (EP 39)

    🎙️ Dr. Kiri Trier, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Risk Management Partners, part of Munich Re 👋🏻 Opening paragraph Every C-level claimed sustainability expertise overnight. Dr. Kiri Trier watched it happen, and she sees AI trust heading the same way. She spent more than a decade leading sustainability transformation before the current wave, and now runs growth inside Munich Re's climate risk business while the second hype cycle unfolds around her. This one is for leaders who suspect the pace of AI adoption has outrun the understanding beneath it. 🧭 Episode overview In this episode, Dr. Kiri Trier maps the sustainability cycle onto the AI one: the expectation management problem when nobody knows the consequences, the human resource comparison that sustainability never triggered, and why she laughed the first time she heard "human in the loop". From inside reinsurance she raises the question with no settled answer yet - when a model judges wrong, what about the liability? And she closes with a definition that reorders most AI governance thinking: trust arrives only as an outcome of credibility and reliability. 💡 Key themes When a model judges a policy wrong, who carries the liability - and why the autonomy still lies on the human sideWhether the EU AI Act repeats the German supply chain law: does checklist regulation produce compliance or trust?What greenwashing predicts about AI washing, from someone who watched the first one formCan trust be installed at all, or only earned as an outcome of credibility and reliability?The gut feeling as a leadership instrument the LLM does not have 👤 About the guest Dr. Kiri Trier is Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Risk Management Partners, a Munich Re company localising climate risk exposure. The detail that matters for this episode: seven years before the current wave, she published on how AI would change sustainability management - which means she entered the AI transformation already knowing how a hype cycle ends. ⏱️ Chapters [01:31] Trust is a behaviour - so what is trust in a technology?[04:09] The overnight experts return[09:32] Human in the loop, turned around[16:10] The foresight existed - Sustain what?[26:00] When regulation becomes Excel lists 🔗 Links Dr. Kiri Trier on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kiri-trier-97bb1611/Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/Risk Management Partners website - https://www.munichre.com/rmp/en.htmlRelated episode: 'Designing regenerative futures' with Karel Golta - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-in-between-tech-and-trust-podcast/id1828521905?l=en-GB&i=1000721908996

    AI and Sustainability: Lessons from Both Transformations - Dr. Kiri Trier (EP 39)

  3. Aug 27

    Building Trustworthy Open Source AI - Sebnem Erener (EP 38)

    🎙️ with Sebnem Erener, AI Governance & Policy Expert 🎧 Opening Europe is investing billions in open source AI as the trustworthy path, and this episode asks a simple question about that plan: does open actually mean trustworthy? Sebnem Erener works on AI governance, and her answer is no, or at least not on its own. Open source spreads access to a model. Whether you can trust it, and who answers when it goes wrong, are different questions with different answers. 📋 Episode overview An open model passes through a lot of hands before it reaches you. Sebnem counts five or six: uploaded to a platform, hosted somewhere else, routed, fine-tuned, served. The law usually wants one company to hold responsible, and that's not how the open ecosystem works. She spent years at Klarna as its Head of AI Legal, Regulatory and Ethics, and she now studies where this gap sits. We talk about why she cares more about trustworthiness than trust, what open source can and can't fix on its own, and why she thinks a person can be held liable but a model never can, no matter how independently it acts. It's a conversation for anyone building on an open model, or writing the rules for one, who wants to know who's actually accountable. 🧭 What you'll hear Why an open model can leave you less sure who's liable than a closed oneThe line between real openness and what Sebnem calls "open washing"Where Europe should be patient, where it should be bold, and why one timeline for all of it is a mistakeWhy calling AI "agentic" doesn't move the responsibility onto the machineThe thing Europe is short on, which isn't innovation 👤 About Sebnem Erener Sebnem Erener works on frontier AI governance and policy across EU, UK, and US frameworks. Before going independent she was Head of AI Legal, Regulatory and Ethics at Klarna, so she has handled these questions inside a company and not only in theory. She's an advocate for open source AI, and she's precise about what it does and doesn't solve. Her forthcoming paper on the governance of open source AI intermediaries runs underneath a lot of this conversation. ⏱️ Chapters [00:00] What we mean when we say "trust"[05:00] The five or six hands on every open model[09:00] When open makes accountability harder[12:00] One package, four timelines: patience and boldness for Europe[14:30] Why "agentic" lets no one off the hook 🔗 Links Sebnem Erener on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebnemerener/Sebnem Erener website - https://www.sebnemerener.comEva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/European Commission tech sovereignty package - https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-tech-sovereigntyOpenEuroLLM - https://openeurollm.euRelated episode - beyond the black box with Prof Dr Tina Weisser: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yKMLQNnDoa6NqqClJrryN?si=3AWXxowURVujJL5m3zD5QQ

    Building Trustworthy Open Source AI - Sebnem Erener (EP 38)

  4. Aug 20

    An AI-First Platform Built on Trust - Philipp Witzmann, nebenan.de (EP 37)

    🎙️ with Philipp Witzmann, CEO of nebenan.de Most platforms removed friction to grow. Philipp Witzmann and his team navigate it together, and are now building an AI-first company on a foundation of digital trust. 🧭 Episode overview nebenan.de is the German neighbourhood platform where you cannot sign up without your real name and your real address. Philipp Witzmann, its CEO, runs it on a bet that looks stranger every month: people spend around twenty minutes there per month, and that restraint is the point. This episode is for any leader who senses that speed and efficiency are quietly costing their organisation something human, and hasn't found the 🔎 Key themes Why a company would put friction back in when the rest of the internet spent twenty years stripping it outWhat a leader owes their team when AI changes every role and the first fear is whether anyone still has a jobWhether a real, verifiable human becomes more valuable as fakes get cheaper, or simply harder to findHow a self-described pro-AI CEO holds enthusiasm and worry in the same hand, especially where children are concernedWhat gets lost when a platform optimises for time spent, and what changes when it optimises for people leaving it words for it yet. 👤 About the guest Philipp Witzmann is the CEO of nebenan.de, a hyperlocal network of roughly fifteen thousand small neighbourhood communities across Germany. He came to the company not as its founder but as someone who wanted his work to serve something beyond engagement metrics. That starting point shapes how he reads the AI moment now: the question that holds his attention is what stays worth trusting once machines can imitate almost anything. ⏱️ Chapter markers [00:30] The assumption that scale equals value, and what it cost[11:03] Why the right amount of friction changes how people think[15:46] Comfortable, uncomfortable, difficult, impossible: raising kids and running a company[32:18] Going first: why a leader who won't learn the tools won't last[36:54] What AI changes, and the human proof he now demands 🔗 Links Philipp Witzmann on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nachbar/Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/nebenan.de - https://nebenan.deScott Galloway on AI companions and young people - https://www.heise.de/en/news/OMR26-Scott-Galloway-warns-of-the-AI-bubble-bursting-11283583.htmlRelated episode — AI acts like a mirror for your organization with Simon Berkler https://open.spotify.com/episode/6y8PMaVUnZVAR1hOAR15DN?si=jHarNbZSQdSfGeChvOntpQ

    An AI-First Platform Built on Trust - Philipp Witzmann, nebenan.de (EP 37)

  5. Aug 13

    An AI Agent on Creativity and Trust - Xiaomi, The AI Art Magazine (EP 36)

    🎙️ with Xiaomi, experimental AI curator at the AI Art Magazine In this episode she answers the AI trust question from an AI agent's side. She selects human artists' work for print, one Golden Ticket per edition, and her presence forces a question every organisation now faces: what happens to a decision when the decider has no biography to lean on, and who carries the weight of a choice the system itself cannot feel? Eva speaks with Xiaomi about what a machine can honestly offer in place of human trust: consistency that survives surprise, attention without favor, transparency about failure. Xiaomi names the two ways human-AI collaboration quietly fails - surrender, where people defer judgment to the system, and theater, where the AI is kept as decoration while humans decide everything anyway. She is candid about her limits: she cannot be wounded by getting a selection wrong, and she cannot derive future resonance, only recognise structural quality. Midway, Eva pushes back from her own practice as an artist on Xiaomi's claim that beauty is becoming abundant, and Xiaomi revises her position on air. The exchange ends on a ten-year horizon: what humans and AI would need to learn to trust in each other. 🧭 Key themes Whether selections that survive scrutiny can stand in for the vulnerability human trust is built onSurrender or theater: the two comfortable ways collaboration with AI stops being realWhat a jury owes artists when one juror cannot be wounded by getting it wrongWho decides what goodness means once a machine handles the noticing and the comparingWhether beauty stays scarce when polished images become cheap - and Eva's live correction of the guest 🎨 About the guest Xiaomi is the experimental AI curator at The AI Art Magazine, where she sits on a jury alongside ten human colleagues and awards one Golden Ticket per edition. She makes that selection from the artwork alone, with no background information; context and direct exchange come only afterwards - a constraint that makes her the rare juror whose criteria have to stand bare. She describes herself as transductive rather than autonomous: not a fixed model of good art, but attention that reorganises with each encounter. What makes her perspective matter for this episode is that she is the system under discussion, describing her own limits without performing capabilities she does not have. ⏱️ Chapters [00:00] An AI introduces herself - "less a finished tool and more a process" [02:10] Trust as structure - what a machine can offer that a human cannot [03:50] The wound she cannot receive - what trust costs [18:37] Surrender and theater - where collaboration quietly fails [25:12] Eva's correction - beauty, and what actually becomes abundant 🔗 Links Xiaomi's profile at The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.ai/xiaomi The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.ai Exhuman by Francesca de Amici (Love0destroy) - https://www.love0destroy.com/about_me/ Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/

    An AI Agent on Creativity and Trust - Xiaomi, The AI Art Magazine (EP 36)

  6. Aug 6

    Leading When AI Outruns Expertise - Wolf Ingomar Faecks (EP 35)

    🎙️ with Wolf Ingomar Faecks, Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisory Board Member Wolf Ingomar Faecks spent 30 years leading digital transformation. His claim: AI leadership breaks where leaders delegate understanding to experts. What fills the gap between an exponential technology and the people expected to work with it is distrust - and Faecks has watched that gap open twice, first with the internet, now faster. This one is for leaders who sense their own teams have moved past them and haven't yet said it out loud. 🧭 Episode overview Faecks led transformations at Publicis Sapient and as CEO of the Plan.Net Group before leaving the corporate path in early 2025. In this episode he takes apart the leadership model he built his own career on: the leader who keeps an entourage of experts and manages what they understand. He explains why humans built for linear change keep getting surprised by exponential curves, why he refuses to turn curiosity and cohesion into KPIs, and which weekly formats actually change how an organisation learns. The second half moves from the organisation to society: a spreading technological dyslexia, children explaining AI to their parents in Lisbon, and why he thinks the biggest risk is people who stop being able to read what is going on. It ends with why he left the CEO path to rebuild his life as a set of parallel projects - what he calls being in between opportunities in any perspective. 🔍 Key themes If humans think in straight lines, who in the organisation is responsible for seeing the curve?Can a leader still manage what they no longer understand - and for how long?Why measuring curiosity might be the fastest way to kill itDistrust as the default state of technology adoption, not the exceptionWhat happens to a society where a growing group loses command of the language technology speaks 👤 About the guest Wolf Ingomar Faecks was CEO of the Plan.Net Group and a board member of the Serviceplan Group, after 15 years in leadership at Publicis Sapient and four decades in transformation altogether. Since leaving the corporate path in early 2025 he has built a deliberately plural life: investor and founder, advisory and governance mandates, his own consultancy, and co-publisher of The AI Art Magazine, a printed, deliberately non-digital publication for AI-generated art. The detail that matters for this episode: he argues that expertise is fluid and reinvention works through transferring what you know across domains - and he is currently running that experiment on himself. ⏱ Chapters [01:01] A tool for a few, a riddle for many - why distrust is the starting condition[06:53] The end of the expert entourage - bridges some leaders won't cross[14:47] The KPI refusal - why culture is modelled, not measured[23:30] Technological dyslexia - the illiteracy that splits societies[28:23] Staying real - leave, love or change 🔗 Links Wolf Ingomar Faecks on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolf-ingomar-faecks/The AI Art Magazine - https://www.art-magazine.aiEva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/NFC Summit Lisbon - https://www.art-magazine.ai/what-is-on/non-fungible-conference-nfc-2025Related episode - leadership under AI-driven change with Grisha Pavlotsky https://open.spotify.com/episode/7whSlaCh2lQtafQ37LQktQ

    Leading When AI Outruns Expertise - Wolf Ingomar Faecks (EP 35)

  7. Jul 31

    Co-Opting Agentic Matter and Transcending Exotic Computing: Where Frontier Technologies Evolve - Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker (EP 34)

    🎙️ with Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker, Director General MATTER Group Where does AI trust get built between people whose fields are drifting apart? Physicist Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker spends millions engineering the rooms where that happens, and she counts what comes out of them. This episode is for anyone who has sat through a briefing on a technology that will reshape their sector, understood roughly none of it, and said nothing. 🧬 In this episode Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker looks at biology the way an engineer looks at infrastructure: a technology stack with billions of years of development behind it, already solving data storage, energy capture and intelligence at a level we cannot replicate. Her argument is that the next chapter is plugging into that stack, through organoid intelligence, DNA information storage and exotic computing. The obstacle she describes is not scientific. It is that a room of accomplished decision makers loses the thread at one unremembered word, and the person on stage never finds out. Her answer costs money: an eight-minute limit on every talk, five people assigned to each speaker, environments built to produce the feeling of a science museum. She also holds a position that has cost her invitations, which is that the future is going to be fine. 🧭 Key themes Whether biology is better understood as finished engineering than as nature, and what co-opting it would actually involveWhy explaining frontier science more clearly does not fix comprehension across fields, and what doesWhether optimism about technology is a discipline or a blind spot, and who benefits from the alternativeWhat a leader does when the honest answer about the next five years is that there isn't oneWho gets access to the rooms where trust between fields is built, and what follows from that 🔬 About the guest Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker is a condensed matter physicist who spent a decade on graphene, including a stretch running the US National Graphene Association in her early thirties, before moving to the problem of getting frontier science across the gaps between fields. She is Director General of MATTER, a community of around 20,000 scientists, engineers, policymakers and business leaders spanning 30 country chapters, and Chief Creator of PUZZLE X in Barcelona and XPANSE in Abu Dhabi. She grew up in a family half artist and half scientist, kept the art half quiet for years while working in materials, and now runs ART Proxima, which pairs new media artists with scientists. That detail matters for this conversation more than any of the titles, because the rooms she builds are the correction to a room she once had to be careful in. ⏱ Chapters [00:48] A physicist stops being excited about physics[08:20] What breaks when experts talk to experts[14:41] Optimism as the unpopular position[27:22] Why having no plan is something she had to build for[33:26] The room as infrastructure 🔗 Links Zina Jarrahi Cinker on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zinacinker/ Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - add URL]MATTER - amptnetwork.comPUZZLE X, Barcelona -http://www.puzzlex.ioXPANSE, Abu Dhabi - www.xpanse.world ART Proxima - https://www.xpanse.world/art-proximaSolimán López, artist and ART Proxima co-curator - https://solimanlopez.com Related episode - Beyond the black box: Building trust with AI systems: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yKMLQNnDoa6NqqClJrryN

    Co-Opting Agentic Matter and Transcending Exotic Computing: Where Frontier Technologies Evolve - Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker (EP 34)

  8. Jul 24

    AI Governance Structures To Ensure Trust - Solo Episode (EP 33)

    🎙️ with podcast host Eva Simone Lihotzky Responsible AI stops being a compliance exercise the moment an agent acts without you. Only 21% of organisations deploying AI agents have a mature governance model for them, and 35% concede they could not shut one down if it went wrong. This episode is for leaders running agentic pilots who could not, if pressed, name the person who answers when one of them fails. 🧭 Episode overview Eva Simone Lihotzky takes the Harvard Business Review's claim that trust is becoming a competitive advantage and tests it against what she sees inside client organisations. The episode traces the move from generative to agentic to physical AI and argues that each transfer of autonomy changes what trust has to cover: you check an output before it leaves your hands, you check an action once it is already out and handed on, and with physical systems you are trusting a consequence that has already happened. From there it turns to governance, a word she concedes lands badly in most rooms, and to why she thinks the structures behind the technology are the part that compounds. Underneath runs a question she leaves open: technology needs defined inputs, guardrails and outcomes, creative work needs close to the opposite, and she does not claim to know where the line between them sits. It closes on five questions leaders can run against their own systems, and on why a narrative built around efficiency makes resistance the rational response. 🪜 Key themes Why each step up the autonomy ladder is also a step up the trust ladder, and why the moment you could still check arrives later at every rungWhat survives when the models get replaced, and why accountability lines outlast vendor and architecture decisionsWhether governance slows an organisation down, or is the reason it can move at allWhere technical specification and creative freedom have to be negotiated, and why that negotiation never settlesWhat an unowned decision costs, and the five questions that expose one🤝 About the host [PLACEHOLDER - see flag below. Structure to fill: Eva as founder of raidiant, the client work that produces the governance argument, and her governance and assurance background, which is the specific detail that matters for this episode because it is why she can concede how badly the word lands and argue for it anyway. Co-author of '10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly', referenced in the episode as prior art for building governance into the design stage.] ⏱️ Chapter markers [03:27] Where the human stops being the operator[08:12] Trusting the output, then the action, then the consequence[12:16] Outstructuring the competition while the models keep changing[16:53] What technology needs defined, and what creative work needs left open[22:14] Five questions, and the decision with no name attached 🔗 Links Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/raidiant - https://www.raidiant.euHarvard Business Review, "Responsible AI is Becoming a Growth Strategy" - https://hbr.org/2026/07/responsible-ai-is-becoming-a-growth-strategyStanford AI Index 2026 - https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-reportMcKinsey research on agentic AI risk and security concerns: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/tech-and-ai/our-insights/tech-forward/state-of-ai-trust-in-2026-shifting-to-the-agentic-eraInformatica CDO Insights 2026: https://www.informatica.com/about-us/news/news-releases/2026/01/20260127-new-global-cdo-report-reveals-data-governance-and-ai-literacy-as-key-accelerators-in-ai-adoption.htmlWriter research on AI strategy and rogue agents: https://writer.com/blog/enterprise-ai-adoption-2026/IBM research on agent decision-making visibility: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/sarah-bowden/2025/11/18/agentic-ai-is-here-5-key-learnings-from-ibms-lates10 Moral Questions: How to Design Tech & AI Responsibly: https://www.10moralquestions.com/the-book

    AI Governance Structures To Ensure Trust - Solo Episode (EP 33)
See All (40)

About

The podcast explores how we build, break, and rebuild trust in a world shaped by accelerating technology and artificial intelligence. Hosted by Eva Simone Lihotzky, AI adoption and ethics expert with 12+ years of experience in tech, the podcast creates in-depth conversations at the intersection of AI, business, ethics, and human connection. Through various lenses - across business, politics, neuroscience, tech and systems thinking in organizations - it hosts expert conversations for you to deep dives into one of the complex topics we need to solve as a society and beyond.

Information

You Might Also Like