AI in Practice: Lessons on Risk, Accountability, and Organizational Reality

Alexandra Wander is an Aerospace Engineer by education, now AI Governance leader with 17 years of experience in responsible innovation – from AI research for autonomous satellites to self-driving vehicle safety. She leads Responsible AI at ZEISS, shaping the global enterprise AI governance framework, driving EU AI Act compliance, and contributing to AI Ethics to ensure that everyone at ZEISS can harness AI at speed and scale, within boundaries that are secure, ethical, and defensible.

Responsible AI is often framed as a set of principles codified in ethics guidelines and stored as pdfs in enterprise managements systems. In practice, it is a continuous series of risk decisions made under incomplete information and competing business priorities.

This talk presents how Responsible AI is operationalized in a global, decentralized organization, drawing on two years of building and running a Responsible AI function at ZEISS Group – and why its long-term placement in the organization is now being fundamentally reconsidered.