About this episode

Katie Fowler discusses the findings of a report on AI governance across 3,000 companies, highlighting the gap between ambition and operational governance.

Good data about how companies are implementing AI governance programs is essential both for organizations to benchmark their efforts, and for observers to understand the state of development. In this episode, Katie Fowler, Director of Responsible Business at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, joins Kevin Werbach to discuss the findings of Responsible AI in Practice , a new report drawing on a global dataset of roughly 3,000 companies across 13 sectors. Fowler unpacks the report's central finding: an enormous gap between corporate AI ambition and operational governance, with 44 percent of companies reporting an AI strategy but only 13 percent publicly committing to a formal governance framework. She argues that the gap is structural rather than just a disclosure failure, noting that AI expertise often sits deep within technical teams rather than at the leadership levels responsible for organization-wide rollout. She points to striking regional variation in workforce protections, the EU AI Act's emergence as a de facto global reference framework even outside Europe, and pushes back on the narrative that regulation stifles innovation. Looking forward, she discusses how investors are…

People in this episode

Host: Kevin Werbach

Guest: Katie Fowler

Topics covered

• AI governance
• corporate strategy
• data transparency
• risk management
• regulation and innovation

Keywords

• AI governance
• corporate AI strategy
• responsible AI
• data transparency
• EU AI Act

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Thomson Reuters Foundation, EU AI Act, Responsible AI in Practice

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