The Road to Accountable AI

Kevin Werbach

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.

  1. 1d ago

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

    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 sites, and weighs how much of the data center backlash reflects local impacts versus broader anxieties about AI. The conversation turns to cybersecurity, where the speed and scale of AI-enabled attacks may outpace defenders. Goldman argues that the AI safety and cybersecurity communities, long divided by culture, must now work together. She closes on what she thinks is underappreciated: how quickly things are changing. Sharon Goldman is the founder of Ground Level AI. She spent four years covering the AI boom, most recently at Fortune and before that at VentureBeat, and has more than 15 years of experience covering technology and business for publications including Business Insider, Forbes, and CIO. She launched Ground Level AI in June 2026 as a newsletter and podcast on Substack. Transcript Ground Level AI Who gets a seat at the table to decide if frontier AI is safe? AI safety and cybersecurity have long been two different worlds. In the age of AI agents, they're colliding

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

  2. Oct 1

    Robert Levitan (Ethical Tech Project): Unlimited Intelligence, But Where's the Wisdom?

    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 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which spurred workplace safety laws and helped shape the New Deal. He expects a comparable AI catastrophe to trigger regulation, and urges executives not to wait for it. Trust is a competitive advantage, he argues, and litigation will arrive much faster than it did for the internet. The conversation closes with why Levitan remains an optimist despite the risks, pointing to healthcare's ethical framework and guardrails as a model for other industries. Disclosure: Kevin Werbach is an advisor to the Ethical Tech Project. Over thirty years, Robert Levitan has founded, scaled, and advised companies including iVillage, Flooz.com, and Pando Networks, and his recent work focuses on the societal impacts of AI. He studied history and public policy in college and describes himself as a serial entrepreneur whose ventures have ranged from a high-profile IPO to a high-profile bankruptcy to a private sale to Microsoft. Transcript Our AI Triangle Shirtwaist Moment Is Coming. Don't Be the Factory Owner (LinkedIn) Pulse 2.0 interview with Levitan

    Robert Levitan (Ethical Tech Project): Unlimited Intelligence, But Where's the Wisdom?

  3. Jun 25

    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. Transcript The Future of AI Security: The Right Architecture for Agents Secure Your Business Against AI Agents

    Harish Peri (Okta): When the Thing Accessing Your Systems Has a Brain

  4. Jun 18

    Logan Kelly (Waxell): The Accidental Agent Governance Company

    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 of Waxell.  In this episode in our series on governing AI agents, CEO Logan Kelly emphasizes that governance should be legible to finance, legal, and compliance teams, not just developers. As he explains, agent governance is less about exotic AI risks than about visibility and control over things companies already care about, such as cost, data access, and who's allowed to do what. Kelly makes the case that the worst outcome isn't an agent misbehaving but companies losing trust in agents altogether and missing their value—arguing that every major technology, from cloud computing onward, arrived with new risks that good governance ultimately made manageable. Looking ahead, he bets that flexible, general-purpose governance will win out over locked-in "walled garden" platforms, as the pace of change in AI keeps accelerating.. Logan Kelly is the Co-Founder and CEO of Waxell, an AI governance and agent observability company that provides a control plane for operating autonomous AI agents in production. The company entered public beta in early 2026. Transcript

    Logan Kelly (Waxell): The Accidental Agent Governance Company

  5. Jun 11

    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.  Transcript Founders' blog: Why We Started Eve Security

    Nadav Cornberg (Eve Security): Interrogating Agents Before They Act

  6. Jun 4

    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.  Transcript The Architecture of Trust (Compfly Manifesto) CoSAI Model Context Protocol Security white paper

    Venkat Siva (Compfly): Governing Agents at the Execution Boundary

  7. May 28

    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.  Transcript Benefits and Harms of Large Language Models in Digital Mental Health From Lived Experience to Insight: Unpacking the Psychological Risks of Using AI Conversational Agents

    Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech): Conversational AI and Mental Health

  8. May 21

    Emre Kazim (Holistic AI): Why AI Governance is Like Cybersecurity

    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 argues this shift has significant implications for who owns AI governance inside enterprises, what skills they need, and why documentation-and-reporting vendors are unlikely to capture the core of the market. Kazim also makes the case that human-in-the-loop oversight, long treated as the default answer to AI risk, has become untenable as systems grow more dynamic and agentic. He distinguishes between two enterprise adoption patterns: a democratic model in which every employee has a copilot, and a vanguard model in which a small number of mission-critical agentic systems drive most of the value and demand most of the governance attention. Finally, he argues that meaningful research capacity will be the price of entry for AI governance firms going forward. Dr. Emre Kazim is the co-founder and co-CEO of Holistic AI, an AI governance platform company spun out of University College London in 2020. He previously served as a Research Fellow in UCL's Department of Computer Science. Kazim has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles on AI ethics and governance, serves as a member of the OECD's Network of Experts on AI, and is involved with the NIST AI Safety Institute. Transcript Towards Algorithm Auditing (Royal Society Open Science, 2024) What is AI Governance? (Holistic Blog, February 2026)

    Emre Kazim (Holistic AI): Why AI Governance is Like Cybersecurity
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About

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.

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