AI is already changing college athletics—but what happens when it moves beyond game film and starts touching athlete performance data, medical information, recruiting, ticketing and operational systems?

In this episode of HAL: Who Signed Off on This?, host Chris Sowa talks with Tom Livers, Associate Athletic Director for IT Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about what AI looks like from inside a major college athletic department. HAL_Chris_Tom

Tom's team supports far more than computers. UNC Athletics runs roughly 280 events per year, including football games with more than 50,000 attendees and basketball games with more than 21,000. His team helps support ticketing, public safety, concessions, merchandising, broadcast systems, replay technology and the infrastructure behind the fan experience. HAL_Chris_Tom

The conversation explores how AI could change that environment, including:

• AI-powered video analysis that can identify plays, players and game events almost instantly
• Combining data from athlete wearables to analyze performance and potentially identify injury risk
• Where athlete data crosses into sensitive educational or medical information
• How FERPA, privacy offices and data-governance teams affect what new technology can access
• Why public roster information is very different from private performance or health information
• The risk of sensitive athletic information creating an advantage for competitors—or even betting markets
• Why some critical systems, such as ticketing, are intentionally isolated from broader internet access
• What happens when technology fails in the middle of a live sporting event
• Why completely banning AI inside an organization may simply push employees to use consumer AI tools outside the organization's controls

Tom describes UNC's approach as a more practical middle ground: establish governance, determine which tools are permitted, and keep institutional data inside appropriately controlled environments rather than assuming employees simply will not use AI. HAL_Chris_Tom

He also sees significant upside. AI-based video analysis could reduce hours of manual game-film work to seconds and eventually may be able to identify movement patterns associated with injury risk. HAL_Chris_Tom

The central question remains the one behind every episode of HAL:

When AI gets access to the data and starts influencing the decision, who signed off on it?

Guest: Tom Livers, Associate Athletic Director for IT Services, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Host: Chris Sowa Podcast: HAL: Who Signed Off on This?

How much authority should enterprises delegate to AI—and where should humans remain firmly in control?

In this episode of HAL: Who Signed Off on This?, host Chris Sowa speaks with Harry Ghuman, CEO of Alpha Decisions and a former senior executive at Oracle and Palo Alto Networks, about moving beyond AI experimentation toward measurable business value. HAL_Chris_Harry

Harry argues that an enterprise is ultimately a collection of decisions and as AI agents become capable of making and executing more of those decisions, organizations need to define what authority AI actually has. The challenge is not only cybersecurity; it is governance, accountability and control.

Chris and Harry discuss:

• Why hundreds of AI pilots may still produce little measurable business value
• How to identify the business processes and bottlenecks where AI can create real economic impact
• Why AI authority should be designed around specific processes and decisions
• The difference between experimentation and consequential AI deployment
• Why "human in the loop" is not a complete governance strategy
• Harry's concept of the AI delegation frontier—what organizations should delegate to AI and what they should not
• Why human judgment remains especially important for highly consequential decisions
• The risk of eliminating entry-level roles that develop tomorrow's experienced decision-makers

The central question is no longer simply, "Can AI do this?" It is: "Who gave it the authority—and should we?"

Harry describes the delegation frontier as determining what can safely be delegated to agents while reserving the most consequential decisions for human judgment.

Rogue AI's have been breaking into companies (like hugging face), committing acts of deception, and yet no one seems to be accountable for the AI Agents we are using at work.

In this opening episode, host Chris Sowa explains what HAL: Who Signed Off on This? is about, why the show is named after the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the three things every leader who puts AI to work has to do, and the three questions every guest gets:

• If an AI moved $100,000 out of your organization tomorrow, who is responsible?
• Do you know what AI can read off your people's screens right now?
• If an agent acted on a record last week, could you show who let it, what it saw, and who approved it?

Deciding where AI should go, what decisions it should be allowed to make, and even what it should see. This show is for the executive leaders who make the key decisions about AI and answer for them: CFOs, CIOs and CISOs, CEOs, heads of claims, school and university leaders, and founders. If that is you, consider this your invitation to join us as a guest.

Chris Sowa spent 30 years at IBM, SAP, Oracle, Accenture and Schneider Electric helping large companies through the last generation of technology shifts, and ran AI companies before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. He is co-founder of RedactSure, an AI controls, governance and privacy company.