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 continue to dominate the consumer and retail market, she argues that domain-specific models will be important for enterprise and regulated use cases, offering better accuracy at dramatically lower cost. The conversation also touches on Singh's engagement with the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences around AI ethics, which has worked on benchmarks that reflect institutional values rather than defaulting to the cultural norms baked into large internet-trained models.

Tanvi Singh is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ekta Inc., a sovereign AI platform company building domain-specific foundation models for governments and regulated industries. She previously served as Group Head of AI, Data & Analytics at UBS and held senior technology leadership roles at Credit Suisse, GE, and Monsanto. She is the founder and managing partner of Nirmata-ai Ventures, a Zurich-based deep-tech venture fund, and serves as a board member of the Global Blockchain Business Council and GirlsCanCode.

Transcript

Sovereign AI: Why States and Institutions Have to Take Back Their Digital Intelligence (HSToday, co-authored with Thomas Cellucci)

Ekta AI