The AI Drop

Latest Episodes:

The AI Drop #16: The AI Race: China's Open-Source Play for Global AI Adoption with Beth George Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

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.

The AI Drop #15: Designing the Future: How Kohler Is Building an AI-Enabled Enterprise with Eric Tabor and Megan Belcher Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

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."

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☑️ Megan Belcher

☑️ Eric Tabor | LinkedIn

☑️ Kohler

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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The AI Drop #14: Privilege, Meet Prompt: A Practical Guide to AI in the Legal World with Rob McCallum Jul 21, 2026

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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.

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☑️ Rob McCallum | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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The AI Drop #13: Who Watches the Agents? Governing Work in the Era of Agentic AI with Jason Stanley Jul 14, 2026

Show notes

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.

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☑️ Jason Stanley | LinkedIn | Substack

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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The AI Drop #12: The Honest Oracle: Smart Contracts, AI Agents, and the View from Abu Dhabi, with Magdalena Konig Jul 07, 2026

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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.

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☑️ Magdalena Konig | LinkedIn

☑️ Sirius International Holding | LinkedIn | Instagram

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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The AI Drop #11: Concrete and Capital: Building the Backbone of the AI Era, with Jessamy Gallagher and Harry Evans Jun 30, 2026

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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.

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☑️ Harry Evans | LinkedIn

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☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

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The AI Drop #10: Before the Briefing: A GC's Guide to AI in the Boardroom, with Elizabeth Bieber Jun 23, 2026

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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.

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☑️ Elizabeth "Leza" Bieber | LinkedIn

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The AI Drop #9: Trust in the Balance: Navigating Reality in the AI Age with Claire Leibowicz Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

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.

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☑️ Claire Leibowicz | LinkedIn | Personal Website

☑️ The Partnership on AI (PAI) | LinkedIn | Facebook

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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The AI Drop #8: Hello, Operator – How AI Agents Recruit Humans to Reach the Offline World with Umang Bhatt Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

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.

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☑️ Umang Bhatt | LinkedIn | X | Github

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☑️ Freshfields

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The AI Drop #7: From Pixels to Physics – How Robots Learn (and Why It's So Hard) with Roozbeh Mottaghi Jun 02, 2026

Show notes

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.

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☑️ Roozbeh Mottaghi | LinkedIn

☑️ Anna Gressel | LinkedIn

☑️ Freshfields

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