Kevin Werbach

The winner in digital payments wasn’t the company with the splashiest marketing or the earliest buzz. It was the one obsessively focused on fraud detection. The same pattern is playing out in AI. The frontier labs investing most heavily in alignment can deploy autonomous tools that competitors can’t match. Labs that dismiss safety concerns keep stumbling into crises that enterprise customers notice. We’ve seen this movie before: Uber’s self-driving unit never recovered after cutting safety corners led to a fatal crash. In this important session, Kevin Werbach draws on historical and recent cases to show that trustworthiness is becoming a core business competency, which is all the more important in the nascent world of AI.

Generative AI chatbots were the opening act. The real revolution is agentic AI: systems that set goals and take action in the world, fundamentally changing the nature of work along the way. The benefits are enormous, but so are the risks. When AI can delete data, execute mistaken transactions or cause physical harm, governance stops being a nice-to-have. Established and emerging frameworks can help manage these risks, though new structures will also be needed to identify agents and keep legal accountability from falling behind. In this timely session, Kevin Werbach explains what agentic AI changes, what it demands and how smart organizations can build governance into their AI strategy early, before the agents start making decisions for them.

AI’s rise has predictably triggered intense regulatory debate worldwide. Major countries and regions are each taking distinct approaches, from Europe’s AI Act to China’s targeted laws to a fragmented American landscape. Meanwhile, private litigation rolls on regardless. The regulatory picture is moving fast, often in contradictory directions, and the political tensions driving it – accelerationists vs. doomers, US vs. China, tech industry libertarians vs. anti-big-tech populists – make the path ahead hard to predict. In this revealing presentation, Kevin Werbach breaks down the most significant legal and regulatory developments globally and offers AI deployers a practical pathway to avoiding missteps and thriving no matter how these debates resolve.

The crypto winter and the ChatGPT moment arrived almost simultaneously, but the real story is how these two transformative technologies are converging. AI faces critical challenges around data governance, alignment and concentration of power — and blockchain may hold the keys to solving them. From content provenance and decentralized compute to AI-powered DAOs and autonomous agents that control real assets, the intersection of blockchain and AI is reshaping how we think about trust, decentralization and the future of the firm itself. Kevin Werbach draws on deep expertise in both domains to map out the landscape: where blockchain enables AI governance and decentralization, where AI supercharges on-chain systems, and what scenarios – from enterprise AI audits to autonomous DeFi agents running wild – organizations need to prepare for. Werbach provides essential guidance for leaders navigating the next wave of technological disruption.

Blockchain and crypto are simultaneously overhyped and underhyped. Digital assets still carry the stigma of speculative bubbles and illicit activity yet dismissing them would be a serious mistake. While headlines chase bitcoin’s price swings and premature Web3 promises, blockchain platforms have quietly matured behind the scenes. Regulators are establishing solid legal foundations, stablecoins are entering global payment systems, and smart contracts are becoming critical enablers for agentic commerce. Kevin Werbach cuts through the noise with a balanced assessment of where digital assets and blockchain actually stand and where they’re headed. This talk is vital for leaders who need to understand what these technologies will actually mean for their business.