AIUC-1: Building trust in AI agents

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.
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**Daniel Whitenack** (0:41)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. I'm Daniel Whitenack. I am CEO at Prediction Guard. And I'm really excited today to have an amazing guest that I'm personally interested in asking a bunch of selfish questions too, because I'm so interested in the topic. We have Emil Lassen, who's the standards lead at the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company. Welcome. How are you doing?

**Emil Lassen** (1:06)
Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for having me. I'm doing great. How are you?

**Daniel Whitenack** (1:09)
I'm doing well. Actually, you know, today in the Midwest, everyone's concerned about tornadoes and talking about hail and some things like insurance and other things. So it's a whole other world, of course. But obviously, the AI underwriting company, way more than thinking about insurance, but thinking about standards, certification around AI and agents. I'm wondering how you personally, just to give the audience a little bit about you personally, how did you end up at this intersection of standards, certification, AI agents? How did that come about?

**Emil Lassen** (1:49)
Yeah. So I don't think I had as clear a path as the classic standards lead where you work as a, say, security engineer for 10 years and then learn the technical craft and then come together. My journey has been very entrepreneurial always. I started my first company with actually the CEO of artificial intelligence company, Runequest, 10 years ago. There was a non-profit back then helping students from low-income backgrounds get into top universities. I think what I took away from that was both the very entrepreneurial journey, but also desire to move fast on some of the challenges that society is facing. I then moved in and had my first interaction with standards at my second company, a real estate company back in Denmark, where we developed an impact management system that both had to navigate a lot of national legislation, local legislation, EU legislation, voluntary frameworks, investor demands. And so had my first interaction with one of these quite complex markets of different measurements and targets you wanted to get to. A very technical sector as well where building codes, for example, require a lot of thinking through how you do things the right way. So spent four years building up a real estate company that today is managing about $400 million together with four other co-founders, and took from that this desire to go in and standardize when we know what the right answer is and try to push the sector in that direction. The way I got into the AI space was taking a step back from the real estate company now a few years ago and going to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, where I spent two years as a fellow at the Kennedy School, really getting into the emerging tech and geopolitics of all of this as well, and left the Kennedy School with a very clear ambition of just getting under the hood of the pace of AI, the safety and security aspects, and clearly just acknowledging that the technology is going to profoundly change society as we know it today. And in many different ways, I have 10 nephews and nieces, I have five sisters, and seeing a 10-year-old being comfortable using AI the way they are is kind of scary. And I don't see yet that we've codified the principles we want to see when it comes to how kids use AI. So that's one direction where, oh, maybe we should develop standards for this.
You also can read news every week and see new incidents. So there's clearly a big security angle to this as well. You said that the Midwest is facing tornadoes today. I think being a CISO at a company adopting and deploying AI right now feels a little bit like you're in a hailstorm and it's only a matter of time before you're hit by some of that.
And we just keep seeing that. So clearly there was a element to that as well. And then there's the even bigger picture around what this will do to our job markets and so forth.
So left the Kennedy School being very interested in just using the public policy toolbox that I brought from that. With the standards toolbox I brought from my real estate company and then this desire to actually just work on societal challenges that I think has been with me since I started working. And that became my way to the artificial intelligence underwriting company. I've since then spent all my time building a network of people, a consortium, to help them figure out how we get the right practical and technical insights into the standards we develop as well.