Building Trust with Responsible AI with Dominique Shelton Leipzig

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and our special guest today, who we'll introduce in a moment. So as organizations rush to implement AI, the challenge is clear. How do we innovate and integrate AI without eroding the human trust that business depends on? Today's conversation explores what it means to build trust with responsible AI, balancing innovation, privacy, and ethics in an era of acceleration. Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:54)
Absolutely delighted to do so. Today, our guest is Dominique Shelton Leipzig. Did I get that right?

**Dominique Shelton Leipzig** (1:02)
Leipzig.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:04)
Leipzig. She's the founder and CEO of Global Data Innovation, Inc. Global Data Innovation is a legal advisory consulting firm for CEOs and board members. Executive leaders and boards engage global data innovation when facing their most complex and multifaceted challenges in AI, data and cybersecurity governance to drive opportunities, reduce risk and also build long-term value. Dominique is one of the world's leading experts on AI governance, data ethics and privacy law. She has advised over 300 companies on responsible innovation, helping leaders align compliance with culture and performance. She is also a very timely topic to have you as a guest today on the show.

**Dominique Shelton Leipzig** (1:52)
Thank you for having me, Tullio.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:56)
Dominique, a recent IBM study found that 85 percent of CEOs believe AI will transform their operations, but less than 40 percent have a framework for responsible implementation. Why is there such a gap between adoption and accountability?

**Dominique Shelton Leipzig** (2:12)
Well, there is, I think, a big misconception at the beginning that generative AI could be deployed as almost kind of a set it and forget it. You get the tools and it'll just work. And what we've seen unfold, Stephen, over the past two, almost three years here is AI trust issues, incidents sort of abounding, and a lack of return on investment because of that fundamental trust that's just not there with the customer base. And so I'm excited to talk about how we address that and turn that around.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:48)
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things as we kind of introduce AI into business, you don't realize that you're adding probably another layer of accountability you need than you that you didn't have in there before suddenly, right? It's like you had your systems in place, everything, you know, going as is. And then now you've added this this new thing in the mix. And sometimes it's a little bit of a wild card, right?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:14)
And you know what, Dominique, there's always the big question, especially when it comes to emerging technology like AI and others in the past. And this is always a big conflict, right? Because you've got the agility and the speed and the benefit of that, that you can get from the technology. But then you also have the challenges of governance, especially in regulated industries. So how do you balance that? That's, you know, got to be a challenge in maintaining organizational effectiveness and building trust and governance while also taking advantage of the agility that this innovation brings to the table.

**Dominique Shelton Leipzig** (3:55)
Yeah. And, you know, I think Generative AI really gives us that opportunity to meld innovation with the accountability right from the get-go as we're building the tools. And so what we've seen is those companies who have been successful have had successful deployment, return on investment, showed real value to their employees, customers, investors. They've taken the trust route. They've actually built their tools to be fit for purpose, have redundancies to ensure accuracy, and can stand behind the product just as just as they would their own employees that they've trained. So someone I did a podcast where I was interviewing a CEO from Verizon Communications, and he said it so well, just because AI does not have an employee ID in a badge doesn't mean that that technology isn't as important to your brand, your reputation as an employee would be. So making sure the company's values are embedded are absolutely critical.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:04)
Yeah, I think even we see that in the marketing side is like, we can tell a good story upstream and say all kinds of nice things about your company, but then downstream in operations if something happens, that's just sideways to that, everything just falls apart, right?

**Dominique Shelton Leipzig** (5:27)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I think about the good intentions that have gone into the three years that we've had a generative AI deployment in companies and studies like the MIT report that came out in August, saying 95% of enterprise deployment of AI has failed. And I know, you know, many technologists and companies take umbrage to that report and question, you know, some of the statistics and how it was formed. But let's face it, Gartner, McKinsey, PwC all have come out with very similar studies. So we have an issue that we need to face and grapple with. And that means a whole reimagining of how we interact with technology and data. Change management that puts humans in the middle and first is really key and critical to the success of the technology. And we're seeing that every single day.