Leading with Integrity: How CEOs Can Harness AI Ethically in a Changing World

This exclusive interview with Karen Silverman was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

Karen Silverman is among the UK’s most respected AI speakers, combining sharp legal insight with forward-thinking strategy. As Founder and CEO of The Cantellus Group, she advises Fortune 50 firms, consortia, and governments on governing frontier technologies in fast-changing policy environments.

With over 20 years as a partner at Latham & Watkins and a host of global roles—World Economic Forum Global Innovator, member of the Global AI Council, and advisor to the ABA’s AI Task Force—Karen brings unmatched credibility to the intersection of AI, ethics, and leadership.

In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, she shares how companies can create practical implementation roadmaps, ethically harness AI, and lead with confidence in the age of innovation. Her insights offer leaders a clear path forward amid technological complexity and regulatory flux.

Q1. With technology advancing faster than regulation, how can businesses realistically integrate AI and other cutting-edge tools while staying compliant and mitigating risk?

Karen Silverman: “That’s a really good question. I think that the real issue and the real premium for companies, particularly in this day and age, is on understanding their priority uses, their risks, and an approach that’s realistic for them for how to use these technologies and integrate them into their businesses.

“When you do that, we can then help them identify some of the common themes and proposed regulations and learnings from what has gone well and what has not gone well in other contexts. You start to see a roadmap emerge that has the right contour for businesses, because not all businesses are the same, we know that, and not all technologies are the same, we know that.

“How to navigate as a business is becoming harder, so creating these roadmaps that are very specific and contextual becomes a little more difficult but also a little more important. That’s how we really start.

“Building realistically based on the needs, priorities, risks and frankly resources of a particular business are really the place to start with successful implementation. We’re seeing more and more examples of it, so things are starting to get exciting in that.”

Q2. Many analysts predict AI will transform not just industries but the very structure of work itself. From your perspective, how will this disruption unfold, and what should leaders be preparing for now?

Karen Silverman: “The way it’ll be different I think is the biggest prediction. Mostly that it will change. Some very smart people are studying the difference between tasks and jobs – that tasks will change before jobs change.

“I think the conventional wisdom is that the dislocation is likely to come from workers who know how to manage with and work with these tools and workers who don’t. So, there’s a rush to build capability in that sense. I don’t think that’s the complete answer though. That’s part of the answer.

“How our day-to-day work is going to change will be a function of why these tools are powerful in the first place, what they’re good at, and what they’re not really good at. One of the things they’re really good at is repetitive tasks where we have a good sense of what “good” looks like.

“Something we do over and over again – that’s the promise of AI, to remove or reduce tedium and improve performance where humans get fatigued or uneven. That’s one context in which AI is very good, and we could roughly call that automation.

“Another area is in idea generation. We see that a lot – the “first draft machine”. It’s quite good at being a first draft machine at this point. Not perfect, but it’s got a lot of utility and promise.

“When you look at those two – automation and the first draft machine – you can start to see aspects of jobs that will change. The important thing about the actual nature of work though is that humans are going to have to think harder. Nobody really talks about that.

“Sure, AI is going to remove some tedium and make us quicker off the mark in some tasks, but we’re going to have to think a lot harder about the quality of the information we’re getting back, the answers that the models are producing, the appropriateness of them, and how those models generated those answers.

“For example, if I’m building a recommender engine, it doesn’t much matter if I get it right or “sort of right”, so I may not overly scrutinise the outputs. But if I’m doing something more impactful – like deciding a loan application, admitting somebody to a school or a work programme, or determining benefits eligibility – I’ve got to be really careful about how I ask the questions, what model I ran, what data it was trained on.

“We’re all going to have to get a lot better at interrogating these models and these tools in ways that are much more cognitively active. We’ve got to train people how to do that and create systems that tolerate that interrogation – and that’s across disciplines.”

Q3. There’s growing pressure on executives to use AI responsibly. What practical steps can CEOs take to ensure their organisation applies artificial intelligence ethically, without stifling innovation?

Karen Silverman: “Really, start with the why and the what. If we reground in existing principles and values – and most companies and leaders have established those in one shape or form – we’ve got to start, there. Sometimes those values and missions and principles need to be updated, revisited and modernised, but starting there as a grounding place is essential.

“From there, the ethical use or the responsible use is really a function of asking lots of questions and creating opportunities for those questions and that learning to happen. Some of the questions are going to be hard questions, and there’s a tendency to want to avoid them.

“The better approach is to figure out both operationally and culturally – and to some degree emotionally – how do we confront those hard questions and help lead our people through them, whether our people are employees, customers, kids, students, or patients.

“There’s an opportunity for people with cultural responsibility for the ethics of an organisation to step into that and create new kinds of relationships and appreciation with the people they impact. Everybody’s anxious about AI. I tend to think of this as an opportunity to integrate ethics with innovation.

“There are a lot of false choices running around. One of the ways businesses can use artificial intelligence ethically is by understanding that this is part of innovation – it’s not opposed to innovation. It’s like the braking system on a car: it’s not just “go slow”, it’s “go slow so you can go fast”.

“Once we do those two things – reground in values and ask hard questions – we can muster the culture and courage to lead. That’s when we see a real path forward for what is loosely called the ethical use of frontier technologies.”