The AI Drop

Freshfields

Unlock the future of artificial intelligence with The AI Drop, a podcast dedicated to delivering cutting-edge insights on how AI is transforming industries worldwide. Each episode features expert interviews and actionable strategies to help you harness AI, drive business value, and navigate evolving legal challenges. Fresh drops every week so you never miss a beat.

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#24
Tuesday · 24 min
The AI Drop #23: The 360-Degree View: How AI Product Counsel Build Trust at Scale with Polina Zvyagina
In this episode of The AI Drop, Anna Gressel sits down with Polina Zvyagina, Director and Executive Lead Counsel for AI & Data Governance at General Motors, to explore one of the most sought-after legal roles in tech today: AI Product Counsel. Polina shares how she helped pioneer the AI product counseling field and explains why the future of AI governance depends on embedding legal, policy, and risk expertise directly into the product development process. Together, Anna and Polina explore how organizations can move beyond treating AI governance as a compliance exercise and instead use it to enable responsible innovation. Polina also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the AI product counsel role, sharing how legal teams work alongside engineers and business leaders to balance innovation with privacy, transparency, consumer protection, and other key risks. For lawyers and governance professionals alike, the conversation provides practical insights into one of the fastest-growing roles in the AI ecosystem. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Polina Zvyagina | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#23
September 15 · 19 min
The AI Drop #22: Hardware, Software, and Everything in Between: How Export Controls Are Adapting to the Full AI Stack with Nabeel Yousef
Export controls have always started with a simple question: what is the thing, and where can it go? AI is complicating that equation. Nabeel Yousef, a Freshfields partner whose practice spans US sanctions, export control, and anti-corruption law, joins host Anna Gressel to map where frontier technology meets national security regulation. Together, they explore the three issues clients are grappling with most: semiconductor controls, the software powering AI infrastructure, and the potential impact of the pending Remote Access Security Act. They also discuss the risks of integrating Chinese AI models, the emerging East-West divide in AI development, and why many compliance programs have become outdated “Frankensteins” in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. As Nabeel explains, one of the biggest compliance risks is assuming your house is already in order. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Nabeel Yousef | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#22
September 8 · 21 min
The AI Drop #21: Least Agency: Rewriting the Cybersecurity Playbook for AI Agents with Megan Kayo
Megan Kayo, a Freshfields partner focused on AI, cybersecurity, and privacy, joins host Anna Gressel to unpack what makes agentic incidents fundamentally different from traditional cybersecurity incidents. Since agents act on their own, spawn sub-agents, and reason unpredictably, they strain frameworks like NIST built for human threat actors. Megan explains why agents require immutable identities and adherence to the principle of "least agency," and why shadow AI and third-party sprawl make the risk surface so hard to govern. Drawing on her experience guiding clients through incidents, Megan also offers practical steps security and legal teams can take to get ahead of agentic risk. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Megan Kayo | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#21
September 1 · 24 min
The AI Drop #20: The Morning Brief: How AI Workflows Are Transforming Legal and Governance Teams with Suchismita Pahi
Whether you're automating your morning to-do list or an entire enterprise compliance program, one principle separates success from failure: figure out the process before you hand it to the tool. Suchismita Pahi, Lead Counsel for Product at Databricks, joins host Anna Gressel to trace that thread from her own daily AI workflows to the AI compliance program she built from the ground up . Instead of a legal checklist nobody wants to fill out, Suchi took an operations-first approach that integrates legal, IT, and security. She and Anna dig into what changes as passive LLMs give way to an agentic enterprise — identity management, the principal-agent problem, acceptable error rates - and they share practical insights on building cross-functional AI governance. The episode concludes with a look at the AI use cases that excite Suchi most, including the future of AI-powered scientific research and innovation. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Suchismita Pahi | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#20
August 25 · 36 min
The AI Drop #19: From Mycelia to Machines: Rethinking Intelligence in an Age of AI with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury
Intelligence isn't a fixed quantity we can measure — it's a construct, and the moment we insist on measuring machines against ourselves, we could miss what they can do and misjudge what they can't. Dr. Rumman Chowdhury — founder and CEO of Humane Intelligence and the first U.S. Science Envoy for AI — joins host Anna Gressel to unpack the ideas behind Thinking About Thinking, her podcast and the book she's now writing. Drawing on everything from mycelial networks to a recent Oxford debate on legal personhood, Rumman and Anna also explore reasoning, anthropomorphizing, and the human skills — discernment, curiosity, imagination — that AI can't automate. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Rumman Chowdhury | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#19
August 18 · 29 min
The AI Drop #18: What's a Robot Worth? Valuation, Data & the Power of Physical AI with Shenwei Zhu and Lauren Schwartz
Is physical AI ready for primetime? Recorded live at Citi's Robotics and Physical AI Conference, this episode captures a market at an inflection point, maturing in "dog years" as it accelerates from demo to deployment at breakneck speed. Host Anna Gressel is joined by Shenwei Zhu, a Citigroup managing director covering industrial technology and robotics, and Lauren Schwartz, CISO and General Counsel of Centific, a global data and AI solutions company. Together they explore why data has become both the bottleneck and the moat in physical AI, how investors evaluate robotics companies on unit economics and customer value, and why the winning proposition is to sell measurable outcomes. Shenwei and Lauren also weigh liability gaps and offer founders hard-won advice on capital and data strategy. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Lauren Schwartz | LinkedIn ☑️ Shenwei Zhu | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#18
August 11 · 18 min
The AI Drop #17: Delegate the Decision, Not the Liability — How the SEC Views Agentic AI with Melissa Hodgman
In this episode, host Anna Gressel is joined by Freshfields Partner Melissa Hodgman, a former SEC enforcement official, who traces that arc from the SEC’s interest in pattern-spotting tools built after the 2008 crisis to today's "AI washing" disclosure cases and other areas of SEC enforcement interest. As Melissa puts it, “you can delegate decision-making to a machine, but you can't delegate liability.” For years, enforcement turned on what a single person knew — knowledge firms could contain with walls, locked doors, and policies. Melissa explains why a learning system that moves information across an organization makes that a far harder question: what did the system know? From there she unpacks how investor protection shapes the agency's interest in agentic AI, and what belongs on a general counsel's hit list. Her closing advice — engage regulators early, and treat securities law as principle-based. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Melissa Hodgman | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#17
August 4 · 22 min
The AI Drop #16: The AI Race: China's Open-Source Play for Global AI Adoption with Beth George
In this episode of The AI Drop, Anna Gressel sits down with Beth George (Freshfields Partner, Head of US Litigation and Global Co-Head of Strategic Risk Management) to discuss the geopolitical implications of China's latest AI advances, including Kimi K3, and what they signal for the global AI race. Rather than focusing solely on who builds the most powerful model, they explore why the real competition may be over AI infrastructure, trust, and global adoption. The conversation examines China's open-source AI strategy, the limits of export controls and bans as policy tools, and why accessibility, reliability, and safety may become the defining differentiators in the next era of AI. They also discuss the growing role of robotics, AI agents, and cybersecurity risks as AI systems become more deeply embedded in everyday life.
#16
July 28 · 27 min
The AI Drop #15: Designing the Future: How Kohler Is Building an AI-Enabled Enterprise with Eric Tabor and Megan Belcher
Kohler's approach to enterprise AI starts with a simple bet: teach every employee to build and manage their own agents rather than bring in consultants. Eric Tabor, Kohler's chief digital officer, and Megan Belcher, the company's chief legal officer, join host Anna Gressel to explain how that philosophy has shaped both the 153-year-old design company's technology roadmap and its governance model. Eric details Kohler's "two-in-a-box" model, pairing associates with technical partners, and the recent rollout of 3,000 AI agents across the company. Megan explains how legal meets clients' risk tolerance while moving with speed, and how she keeps the board abreast of a rapidly evolving competitive landscape. Their advice for teams starting out with AI: "hold hands...and be willing to jump." Connect and Learn More ☑️ Megan Belcher ☑️ Eric Tabor | LinkedIn ☑️ Kohler ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#15
July 21 · 24 min
The AI Drop #14: Privilege, Meet Prompt: A Practical Guide to AI in the Legal World with Rob McCallum
When privileged prompts pass through an AI tool, whether they stay privileged is a key question coming before courts globally today — and those courts are digging into the facts and terms to decide. Rob McCallum, a Freshfields tech litigator, tells host Anna Gressel that privilege questions come up in his practice pretty much every day, and that the conversation has shifted from whether to use AI at all to how to use it responsibly when privileged communications are in the mix. He and Anna also cover AI note-takers as discoverable records, cross-border differences in privilege law, and where governance over privileged communications and documents actually starts. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Rob McCallum | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#14
July 14 · 26 min
The AI Drop #13: Who Watches the Agents? Governing Work in the Era of Agentic AI with Jason Stanley
As AI agents become more autonomous, who is responsible for overseeing their work? In this episode of The AI Drop, host Anna Gressel is joined by Jason Stanley, Head of Applied AI Research at ServiceNow, for a deep dive into the emerging world of agentic AI governance. Together, they explore why traditional AI governance frameworks may not be enough for autonomous systems, the importance of deployment-specific evaluation, and how organizations can build trust, accountability, and effective human-AI collaboration. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Jason Stanley | LinkedIn | Substack ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#13
July 7 · 26 min
The AI Drop #12: The Honest Oracle: Smart Contracts, AI Agents, and the View from Abu Dhabi, with Magdalena Konig
What happens when agentic AI's agility meets blockchain rigidity? Magdalena Konig, GC of Sirius International Holding — IHC's technology subsidiary — argues the result is paradoxically powerful: a more agile, rigid structure where use cases multiply exponentially. Host Anna Gressel sits down with Magdalena in Abu Dhabi to explore how smart contracts and agents are natural partners, from logistics pipelines that auto-execute payment on delivery to new financial access for the world's unbanked. The conversation also covers governance, liability, and human oversight in increasingly autonomous systems, alongside a look at the UAE's rapid emergence as a global hub for AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure innovation. The conversation also covers governance, liability, and human oversight in increasingly autonomous systems, alongside a look at the UAE's rapid emergence as a global hub for AI, blockchain, and digital infrastructure innovation. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Magdalena Konig | LinkedIn ☑️ Sirius International Holding | LinkedIn | Instagram ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#12
June 30 · 32 min
The AI Drop #11: Concrete and Capital: Building the Backbone of the AI Era, with Jessamy Gallagher and Harry Evans
Data centers are dominating headlines — and the pressures behind them are only growing. In this episode, host Anna Gressel welcomes Jessamy Gallagher, Freshfields partner and global head of the firm's Energy and Real assets group, and Harry Evans, a Freshfields partner in Singapore focused on tech, telecom, and financial services. They map the data center boom from two angles: global capital markets and Asia's build landscape. They break down why AI has nearly doubled sector growth rates, how asset-backed securitization is unlocking new capital pools, and why power is the fundamental long-term constraint. The conversation covers off-grid power solutions, community pushback from Tokyo to Ireland, and what keeps investors awake: geopolitics, cooling constraints, and whether quantum chips could eventually upend today's infrastructure stack. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Harry Evans | LinkedIn ☑️ Jessamy Gallagher | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#11
June 23 · 21 min
The AI Drop #10: Before the Briefing: A GC's Guide to AI in the Boardroom, with Elizabeth Bieber
Most boards today have no clear owner for AI oversight and according to Freshfields Partner Elizabeth Bieber. That may not be fatal, but it is a problem that needs a plan. Anna Gressel and Leza, who leads Freshfields' shareholder engagement and activism defense practice, dig into the practical challenges General Counsels face when preparing board briefings on AI. They explore the tension between presenting a polished, "bow on top" strategy and the reality that AI moves faster than quarterly board meetings. Leza argues that effective governance isn't about having the policy — it's about making the policy drive the right behavior. The conversation also covers how AI should reshape committee charters across audit, compensation, and nominating governance — and whether directors themselves should have guardrails around their own use of AI tools. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Elizabeth "Leza" Bieber | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#10
June 16 · 28 min
The AI Drop #9: Trust in the Balance: Navigating Reality in the AI Age with Claire Leibowicz
As the line between real and synthetic blurs, trust is becoming one of the defining challenges of the AI era. In this episode, Anna Gressel and Claire Leibowicz (Director of AI, Trust, and Society at the Partnership on AI (PAI)) explore how synthetic media is reshaping authenticity - well beyond deepfakes - raising complex questions about misrepresentation, context, and evidence. They discuss emerging transparency tools, from watermarking to provenance standards, and the challenge of making disclosures meaningful across legal and everyday settings. The conversation also examines how algorithms and distribution systems shape perception at scale. Looking ahead, they turn to AI agents and the next frontier of trust where questions of identity, accountability, and verification take center stage. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Claire Leibowicz | LinkedIn | Personal Website ☑️ The Partnership on AI (PAI) | LinkedIn | Facebook ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#9
June 9 · 23 min
The AI Drop #8: Hello, Operator – How AI Agents Recruit Humans to Reach the Offline World with Umang Bhatt
Most debates about AI focus on the people using it. Umang Bhatt is asking us to pay attention to what happens at the edges of that interaction — including the people who never touch AI but increasingly bear its consequences, and the human labor that AI agents subtly pull into their workflows. Umang is an Assistant Professor in Trustworthy AI at the University of Cambridge, and he joins host Anna Gressel for part one of a two-part conversation. Drawing on his recent Noema article, “AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans to Observe the Offline World,” Umang explains what it means for humans to be “on call” for AI agents — the novel scenario in which agents may reach out directly to people to supply a piece of information the agent can't access on its own. As agent capabilities surpass human skills in some domains, Umang argues, the question becomes how to orchestrate humans and agents on the same team — profiling what each is good at, deciding who handles which subtask, and designing the handoffs between them. The conversation turns to “secondhand AI” — Umang's term for the second-order effects of someone else's AI use on the people around them — and what responsible deployment looks like when the line between tool and teammate keeps shifting. Resources From This Episode ☑️ Bhatt, “AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans To Observe The Offline World,” Noema Magazine, March 5, 2026. ☑️ Jorgensen et al., “Documenting Deployment with Fabric: A Repository of Real-World AI Governance,” AIES 2025, arXiv:2508.14119. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Umang Bhatt | LinkedIn | X | Github ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#8
June 2 · 21 min
The AI Drop #7: From Pixels to Physics – How Robots Learn (and Why It's So Hard) with Roozbeh Mottaghi
Between scripted demos, the simulation-to-reality gap, and the absence of any shared benchmark, the robotics field is full of progress that's easy to overstate and hard to measure. "I hate to say this, but most of them are fake," says Roozbeh Mottaghi, a leading robotics and embodied AI researcher, of the viral humanoid robot videos. He joins host Anna Gressel to discuss how robots learn and what that means for the future of the field. Roozbeh and Anna unpack a core hurdle in robotics — building general-purpose robots that generalize across environments and objects — plus the gap between simulation and reality, and why safety becomes the top concern once robots work alongside people. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Roozbeh Mottaghi | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#7
May 26 · 25 min
The AI Drop #6: Training Day – AI and EU Copyright Trends with Lutz Riede
The EU is front and center in the discussion about copyright issues and technology, so host Anna Gressel invites colleague Dr. Lutz Riede to unpack the state of play for businesses operating that space. A Vienna-based partner who specializes in intellectual property and technology law, Lutz describes the biggest misconceptions that companies have about EU copyright law, high-impact litigation pending in Germany, and the key difference in legal philosophy between the EU and US. The conversation closes out with Lutz’ practical pointers for companies out of the AI space that are tuning models or using third-party models. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Dr. Lutz Riede | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#6
May 19 · 24 min
The AI Drop #5: Looking East – How Asia Is Writing Its Own AI Rules with Rohit Bhat
When it comes to technology, Asian regulators have seemed to follow the lead of their EU and US counterparts. No longer. “With AI, it is transformational, and jurisdictions in Asia are taking note and wanting to ensure that this technology is used for the greater good of their respective society,” says Rohit Bhat. In this globe-trotting conversation with host Anna Gressel, he touches down in India, Singapore, and South Korea. Tune in for his insights about India, with its Information Technology Act that regulates synthetically generated information; Singapore, with its recent influential conference on agentic AI; and South Korea, with its risk-based AI Basic Act that regulates high-impact AI. At the end of the day, Rohit observes, AI is transforming the industry wherever you are on the global stage. Connect and Learn More ☑️ Rohit Bhat | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
#5
May 12 · 34 min
The AI Drop #4: Pulling Back the Curtain on Agentic AI, with Geoff Schaefer
Geoff Schaefer, vice president of AI Strategy and Governance at Leidos, returns to “The AI Drop” to unpack agentic AI strategy, the subject of his newest book. Host Anna Gressel leads off the conversation with a lightning round of questions such as the biggest surprises he’s seen, the number one skill that employees in an agentic workplace must have, and the value that AI agents are actually providing in the workplace. Tune in as he explains why Leidos’ hybrid org chart places human FTEs alongside agent FAEs (full-time agent equivalents), why it’s no longer wrong to anthropomorphize AI, and why a colleague at Leidos is building a “zero trust” architecture for AI – similar to zero trust principles in cybersecurity and organizational security. Connect and Learn More: ☑️ Geoff Schaefer | LinkedIn ☑️ Leidos ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields ☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

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