Manoj Saxena, Founder and Chairman, Responsible AI Institute
Eight years ago, I founded the Responsible AI Institute (RAI Institute) with a vision to ensure AI is deployed responsibly. Today, as AI adoption accelerates, organizations struggle to balance governance with innovation. Recognizing this gap, RAI Institute is shifting from policy advocacy to practical AI governance solutions, aligning with insights from the Open Problems in Technical AI Governance paper.
Closing the AI Governance Gap
The Open Problems paper highlights three core governance needs:
Identifying areas for intervention – Understanding when and how to regulate AI systems to mitigate risks while enabling innovation.
Informing governance decisions – Providing evidence-based insights into the efficacy of different governance approaches.
Enhancing governance mechanisms – Developing verification, security, and compliance tools that reinforce AI accountability.
RAI Institute’s strategic shift meets these needs with AI-driven verification, benchmarking, and risk management tools that integrate governance into AI deployment.
AI Operationalization: From Policy to Practice
Historically, AI governance has been reactive. However, proactive governance through AI model audits, deployment evaluations, and compute monitoring is essential.
RAI Institute’s RAI Watchtower Agent, a real-time AI risk monitoring system, addresses concerns around downstream impact evaluations and model verification. Additionally, RAISE Pathways Agents for Badging and Verification provide digital credentialing to ensure compliance with responsible AI principles, tackling accountability and transparency challenges identified in the Open Problems paper.
Verification and Benchmarking: Ensuring AI Accountability
As AI systems become more complex, organizations need scalable verification frameworks to ensure trust, compliance, and performance. The Responsible AI Institute (RAI) introduces a suite of AI Verification Badges that rigorously assess security, governance, sustainability, and fairness across Agentic, Generative, and Machine Learning AI systems. These structured benchmarks help members navigate evolving regulatory landscapes, enhance public trust, and deploy AI responsibly with confidence.
Responsible Agentic AI: The Next Frontier
With AI systems increasingly operating autonomously, new governance challenges arise. The Open Problems paper highlights concerns around multi-agent evaluation, adversarial robustness, and unauthorized model fine-tuning.
As someone who has spent decades at the intersection of business and emerging technologies, I believe the shift toward Agentic AI represents one of the most significant inflection points in computing history. These systems, which can independently take actions on behalf of users, introduce unprecedented governance challenges that traditional frameworks simply cannot address. The stakes are extraordinarily high – when AI systems can autonomously execute financial transactions, access sensitive systems, or make consequential decisions without human oversight, the margin for error essentially disappears.
For example, RAI Institute’s upcoming Agentic AI Vulnerability Resilience Badge rigorously scores and verifies the robustness of Agentic AI systems against industry-leading standards and guidelines for red teaming and blue teaming Agentic AI systems. This ensures that our members can confidently deploy AI Agents with resilience and security, mitigating risks before deployment.
A Call to Action
The Responsible AI Institute’s transformation represents a pivotal shift in AI governance, taking insights from cutting-edge research and translating them into tangible, actionable solutions. The Open Problems in Technical AI Governance paper serves as a foundational roadmap, reinforcing the need for technical, operational, and scalable AI governance mechanisms.
As businesses race to adopt AI, the need for structured, verifiable, and real-time AI governance has never been greater. RAI Institute is leading the charge, ensuring that organizations have the tools they need to deploy AI responsibly without stifling innovation.
Join the RAI Institute’s early access program for Digital Credentialing and AI Badging and help shape the future of responsible AI governance.
Read the full Open Problems in Technical AI Governance paper
About the Responsible AI Insitute
Since 2016, Responsible AI Institute (RAI Institute) has been at the forefront of advancing responsible AI adoption across industries. As an independent non-profit organization, RAI Institute partners with policymakers, industry leaders, and technology providers to develop responsible AI benchmarks, governance frameworks, and best practices. RAI Institute equips organizations with expert-led training and implementation toolkits to strengthen AI governance, enhance transparency, and drive innovation at scale.
Current and past members of RAI Institute include leading global companies such as AWS, Ally Bank, AMD, Boston Consulting Group, Genpact, Kennedys, KPMG, ATB Financial, IBM, and the US Department of Defense to name a few. In addition, we have partnered with leading global universities such as University of Cambridge, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard Business School, The University of Texas at Austin, Michigan State University, University of Toronto, and the University of Michigan.
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For all media inquiries please refer to Head of Strategy and Marketing, Nicole McCaffrey.
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