The AI Drop

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  The AI Drop #22: Hardware, Software, and Everything in Between: How Export Controls Are Adapting to the Full AI Stack with Nabeel Yousef 15.09.2026 19мин

  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Chinese AI models, the emerging East-West divide in AI development, and why many compliance programs have become outdated “Frankensteins” in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.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
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  The AI Drop #21: Least Agency: Rewriting the Cybersecurity Playbook for AI Agents with Megan Kayo 08.09.2026 21мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #20: The Morning Brief: How AI Workflows Are Transforming Legal and Governance Teams with Suchismita Pahi 01.09.2026 24мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #19: From Mycelia to Machines: Rethinking Intelligence in an Age of AI with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury 25.08.2026 36мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #18: What's a Robot Worth? Valuation, Data & the Power of Physical AI with Shenwei Zhu and Lauren Schwartz 18.08.2026 29мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #17: Delegate the Decision, Not the Liability — How the SEC Views Agentic AI with Melissa Hodgman 11.08.2026 18мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #16: The AI Race: China's Open-Source Play for Global AI Adoption with Beth George 04.08.2026 22мин

  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.
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  The AI Drop #15: Designing the Future: How Kohler Is Building an AI-Enabled Enterprise with Eric Tabor and Megan Belcher 28.07.2026 27мин

  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
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  The AI Drop #14: Privilege, Meet Prompt: A Practical Guide to AI in the Legal World with Rob McCallum 21.07.2026 24мин

  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.
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  The AI Drop #13: Who Watches the Agents? Governing Work in the Era of Agentic AI with Jason Stanley 14.07.2026 26мин

  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.
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  The AI Drop #12: The Honest Oracle: Smart Contracts, AI Agents, and the View from Abu Dhabi, with Magdalena Konig 07.07.2026 26мин

  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.
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  The AI Drop #11: Concrete and Capital: Building the Backbone of the AI Era, with Jessamy Gallagher and Harry Evans 30.06.2026 32мин

  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 estate 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.
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  The AI Drop #10: Before the Briefing: A GC's Guide to AI in the Boardroom, with Elizabeth Bieber 23.06.2026 21мин

  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
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  The AI Drop #9: Trust in the Balance: Navigating Reality in the AI Age with Claire Leibowicz 16.06.2026 28мин

  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
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  The AI Drop #8: Hello, Operator – How AI Agents Recruit Humans to Reach the Offline World with Umang Bhatt 09.06.2026 23мин

  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
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  The AI Drop #7: From Pixels to Physics – How Robots Learn (and Why It's So Hard) with Roozbeh Mottaghi 02.06.2026 21мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #6: Training Day – AI and EU Copyright Trends with Lutz Riede 26.05.2026 25мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #5: Looking East – How Asia Is Writing Its Own AI Rules with Rohit Bhat 19.05.2026 24мин

  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  
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  The AI Drop #4: Pulling Back the Curtain on Agentic AI, with Geoff Schaefer 12.05.2026 34мин

  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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  The AI Drop #3: Check Engine Light – What Every Board Needs to Know About AI Oversight with Doru Gavril 05.05.2026 26мин

  Freshfields partner Doru Gavril remembers listening to the iconic radio show “Car Talk,” where the host would diagnose callers’ car problems. Host Anna Gressel takes the calls, and Doru diagnoses the caller’s AI ailment. Doru peeks under the hood to talk the callers through fixing their issues. Tune in to hear why – just like in “Car Talk” – the answer is often the "carburetor." And why companies and boards should think about diagnosing key AI considerations now. “You have time, but you also cannot wait,” he says. “You need to start thinking about it now, both strategically and operationally.” Connect and Learn More ☑️ Doru Gavril | LinkedIn ☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn ☑️ Freshfields