AI Needs You with Verity Harding
From Thinkers & Ideas by BCG Henderson Institute
June 9, 2026 · 38 min
About this episode
Verity Harding discusses the importance of inclusive AI governance and draws parallels with historical regulatory successes.
In AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own , Verity Harding argues that AI governance is too important to be left to technologists alone—and that the rest of us need to join the conversation to shape this technology’s future. Harding is the director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and the founder of Formation Advisory. She spent more than a decade at Alphabet, first as head of Security Policy at Google, then as DeepMind’s first global head of Policy. In her book, she draws on historical case studies to show that democratic societies have successfully governed transformative technologies in the past. In her conversation with Nikolaus Lang, global leader of the BCG Henderson Institute, she discusses why the nuclear arms race is the wrong analogy for AI, what the 1967 Outer Space Treaty can teach us about cooperation between rivals, how Britain’s regulation of IVF became a gold standard by depoliticizing the technology, and what business leaders get wrong about their own role in shaping AI governance. Key topics discussed: 01:56 | Why the framing of AI as “too complex for nonexperts" is…
People in this episode
Host: Nikolaus Lang
Guest: Verity Harding
Topics covered
- AI governance
- technology regulation
- democratic societies
- historical case studies
- cooperation between rivals
- business leadership in AI
Keywords
- AI governance
- Verity Harding
- technology regulation
- nuclear arms race
- 1967 Outer Space Treaty
- IVF regulation
- democratic societies
- business leadership
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Bennett School of Public Policy, Formation Advisory, Alphabet, Google, DeepMind
Books & works: AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own
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