As AI agents become more autonomous, who is responsible for overseeing their work? 

In this episode of The AI Drop, host Anna Gressel is joined by Jason Stanley, Head of Applied AI Research at ServiceNow, for a deep dive into the emerging world of agentic AI governance. Together, they explore why traditional AI governance frameworks may not be enough for autonomous systems, the importance of deployment-specific evaluation, and how organizations can build trust, accountability, and effective human-AI collaboration.

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☑️ Jason Stanley | LinkedIn | Substack

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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What happens when agentic AI's agility meets blockchain rigidity? Magdalena Konig, GC of Sirius International Holding — IHC's technology subsidiary — argues the result is paradoxically powerful: a more agile, rigid structure where use cases multiply exponentially. Host Anna Gressel sits down with Magdalena in Abu Dhabi to explore how smart contracts and agents are natural partners, from logistics pipelines that auto-execute payment on delivery to new financial access for the world's unbanked.

The conversation also covers governance, liability, and human oversight in increasingly autonomous systems, alongside a look at the UAE's rapid emergence as a global hub for AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure innovation.

The conversation also covers governance, liability, and human oversight in increasingly autonomous systems, alongside a look at the UAE's rapid emergence as a global hub for AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure innovation.

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☑️ Magdalena Konig | LinkedIn

☑️ Sirius International Holding | LinkedIn | Instagram

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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Data centers are dominating headlines — and the pressures behind them are only growing. In this episode, host Anna Gressel welcomes Jessamy Gallagher, Freshfields partner and global head of the firm's Energy and Real assets group, and Harry Evans, a Freshfields partner in Singapore focused on tech, telecom, and financial services. They map the data center boom from two angles: global capital markets and Asia's build landscape.

They break down why AI has nearly doubled sector growth rates, how asset-backed securitization is unlocking new capital pools, and why power is the fundamental long-term constraint. The conversation covers off-grid power solutions, community pushback from Tokyo to Ireland, and what keeps investors awake: geopolitics, cooling constraints, and whether quantum chips could eventually upend today's infrastructure stack.

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☑️ Harry Evans | LinkedIn

☑️ Jessamy Gallagher | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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Most boards today have no clear owner for AI oversight and according to Freshfields Partner Elizabeth Bieber. That may not be fatal, but it is a problem that needs a plan. Anna Gressel and Leza, who leads Freshfields' shareholder engagement and activism defense practice, dig into the practical challenges General Counsels face when preparing board briefings on AI.

They explore the tension between presenting a polished, "bow on top" strategy and the reality that AI moves faster than quarterly board meetings. Leza argues that effective governance isn't about having the policy — it's about making the policy drive the right behavior. The conversation also covers how AI should reshape committee charters across audit, compensation, and nominating governance — and whether directors themselves should have guardrails around their own use of AI tools.

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☑️ Elizabeth "Leza" Bieber | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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As the line between real and synthetic blurs, trust is becoming one of the defining challenges of the AI era.

In this episode, Anna Gressel and Claire Leibowicz (Director of AI, Trust, and Society at the Partnership on AI (PAI)) explore how synthetic media is reshaping authenticity - well beyond deepfakes - raising complex questions about misrepresentation, context, and evidence. They discuss emerging transparency tools, from watermarking to provenance standards, and the challenge of making disclosures meaningful across legal and everyday settings.

The conversation also examines how algorithms and distribution systems shape perception at scale. Looking ahead, they turn to AI agents and the next frontier of trust where questions of identity, accountability, and verification take center stage.

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☑️ Claire Leibowicz | LinkedIn | Personal Website

☑️ The Partnership on AI (PAI) | LinkedIn | Facebook

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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Most debates about AI focus on the people using it. Umang Bhatt is asking us to pay attention to what happens at the edges of that interaction — including the people who never touch AI but increasingly bear its consequences, and the human labor that AI agents subtly pull into their workflows. Umang is an Assistant Professor in Trustworthy AI at the University of Cambridge, and he joins host Anna Gressel for part one of a two-part conversation.

Drawing on his recent Noema article, “AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans to Observe the Offline World,” Umang explains what it means for humans to be “on call” for AI agents — the novel scenario in which agents may reach out directly to people to supply a piece of information the agent can't access on its own. As agent capabilities surpass human skills in some domains, Umang argues, the question becomes how to orchestrate humans and agents on the same team — profiling what each is good at, deciding who handles which subtask, and designing the handoffs between them. The conversation turns to “secondhand AI” — Umang's term for the second-order effects of someone else's AI use on the people around them — and what responsible deployment looks like when the line between tool and teammate keeps shifting.

Resources From This Episode

☑️ Bhatt, “AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans To Observe The Offline World,” Noema Magazine, March 5, 2026.

☑️ Jorgensen et al., “Documenting Deployment with Fabric: A Repository of Real-World AI Governance,” AIES 2025, arXiv:2508.14119.

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☑️ Umang Bhatt | LinkedIn | X | Github

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

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Between scripted demos, the simulation-to-reality gap, and the absence of any shared benchmark, the robotics field is full of progress that's easy to overstate and hard to measure. "I hate to say this, but most of them are fake," says Roozbeh Mottaghi, a leading robotics and embodied AI researcher, of the viral humanoid robot videos. He joins host Anna Gressel to discuss how robots learn and what that means for the future of the field. Roozbeh and Anna unpack a core hurdle in robotics — building general-purpose robots that generalize across environments and objects — plus the gap between simulation and reality, and why safety becomes the top concern once robots work alongside people. 

☑️ Roozbeh Mottaghi | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

The EU is front and center in the discussion about copyright issues and technology, so host Anna Gressel invites colleague Dr. Lutz Riede to unpack the state of play for businesses operating that space. A Vienna-based partner who specializes in intellectual property and technology law, Lutz describes the biggest misconceptions that companies have about EU copyright law, high-impact litigation pending in Germany, and the key difference in legal philosophy between the EU and US. The conversation closes out with Lutz’ practical pointers for companies out of the AI space that are tuning models or using third-party models.

☑️ Dr. Lutz Riede | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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When it comes to technology, Asian regulators have seemed to follow the lead of their EU and US counterparts. No longer. “With AI, it is transformational, and jurisdictions in Asia are taking note and wanting to ensure that this technology is used for the greater good of their respective society,” says Rohit Bhat. In this globe-trotting conversation with host Anna Gressel, he touches down in India, Singapore, and South Korea. Tune in for his insights about India, with its Information Technology Act that regulates synthetically generated information; Singapore, with its recent influential conference on agentic AI; and South Korea, with its risk-based AI Basic Act that regulates high-impact AI. At the end of the day, Rohit observes, AI is transforming the industry wherever you are on the global stage.

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☑️ Rohit Bhat | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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Geoff Schaefer, vice president of AI Strategy and Governance at Leidos, returns to “The AI Drop” to unpack agentic AI strategy, the subject of his newest book. Host Anna Gressel leads off the conversation with a lightning round of questions such as the biggest surprises he’s seen, the number one skill that employees in an agentic workplace must have, and the value that AI agents are actually providing in the workplace. Tune in as he explains why Leidos’ hybrid org chart places human FTEs alongside agent FAEs (full-time agent equivalents), why it’s no longer wrong to anthropomorphize AI, and why a colleague at Leidos is building a “zero trust” architecture for AI – similar to zero trust principles in cybersecurity and organizational security.

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☑️ Geoff Schaefer | LinkedIn

☑️ Leidos

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☑️ Freshfields

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