Five Questions for Renée Cummings: Award-Winning AI Ethicist and Instructor for All Tech Is Human's Responsible AI Course
This October, All Tech Is Human is launching a dynamic new Responsible AI (RAI) course designed for aspiring RAI practitioners and AI Governance professionals, as well as those preparing to build AI Governance programs within an organization.
Rooted in practical insights and real-world applications, the course offers a foundational understanding of Responsible AI: its principles, history, and evolution as a field, as well as an exploration of current roles, industry best practices, and the evolving governance landscape.
Led by ATIH Executive Director, Rebekah Tweed, and award-winning AI Ethicist, Professor Renée Cummings, with contributions from ATIH affiliates Heidi Hysell and Savannah Thais and ATIH’s RAI working group, this course will equip participants with the essential foundational knowledge to begin the process of effectively operationalizing Responsible AI and AI governance programs within organizations.
We asked Renée Cummings a few questions about the difficulty of keeping up with the speed of innovation, key turning points that have shaped the Responsible AI movement, competing priorities in AI Governance, applications of RAI principles that have made a tangible difference, and what skills she is hoping that participants in our course will learn.
AI-driven product releases and foundation model capabilities seem to be evolving faster than regulations can keep up. Why is it so important in this current moment for people across sectors and industries to understand the principles of Responsible AI and the core practices of AI governance?
We are living in a moment of rapid, real-time intelligence innovation, unimaginable, often unnoticed, and at times seemingly unstoppable, where AI capabilities are advancing far faster than regulation can respond. Responsible AI is not only about building trust, ensuring safety, protecting rights, and mitigating risks while harnessing rewards; it is also about recognizing the responsibility we hold in shaping these systems. Equally, Responsible AI is about economic competitiveness at a time when AI is reimagining industries and transforming every business models.
The organizations that embed Responsible AI into their strategies will be the ones that lead, and the governments that weave Responsible AI into their national agendas will be the ones that guarantee their populations resilient economies and sustainable societies, ensuring labor markets and workforces remain adaptive, innovative, and never relegated to obscurity.
Responsible AI is also as much about education as it is about empowerment—through literacy, adaptability, and the ability to augment or reinvent skills. The more people understand the opportunities offered through Responsible AI, the more empowered they become to shape technologies that serve humanity with fairness, accountability, compassion, and vision.
By the end of this course, what skills or insights do you hope participants will have learned that can help them lead or influence Responsible AI work in their organizations or communities?
Participants will leave with the confidence and capacity to see Responsible AI as a strategic advantage and a civic duty. They will learn how to embed fairness, transparency, and accountability into AI systems and recognize how these practices fuel innovation, trust, and sustain competitiveness. Most importantly, participants will come to see Responsible AI as a way of life, as instinctive as looking left and right before crossing the street. They will understand that Responsible AI is about due diligence and duty of care, the awareness and mindfulness we bring to our daily lives, and the duty to warn we expect in society.
Just as traffic signs caution us, elevators mark their capacity, menus flag allergens or spice levels, and medicines disclose side effects, Responsible AI must become a new form of public engagement and public information, a new way of being in an algorithmic age. Responsible AI is empowerment: a means of advocating for ourselves and our communities in tech spaces where many feel they have little power. With Responsible AI literacy, participants will be prepared not only to safeguard their communities but also to lead responsibly, decisively, and imaginatively, with AI, in their organizations.
From your perspective, if you had to pick just one, what’s the most significant historical event or turning point that shaped the Responsible AI movement, and why does it still matter today?
The daily challenges of data reveal both its power and its vulnerability. Today, data is a geopolitical game changer, bought, traded, sold, stolen, weaponized, and monetized. It is both the brain and the heart of an algorithm: the brain, learning, reasoning, and decision-making; the heart, fueling the flow of information that keeps systems alive.
Data is the vital organ of algorithms, shaping how they function and how they fail. We have seen how biased data can enable algorithms to amplify systemic racism, but we have also learned that good data can be lifesaving. Responsible AI is not only about preventing harm but also about sustaining legitimacy, trust, and long-term competitive advantage. It shows that when people are educated about AI bias and risks and the rights that need to be protected, they are empowered not only to demand better systems but to design and govern them.
Can you share an example in which the application of a Responsible AI principle made a tangible difference in the deployment of a real-world AI system?
The greatest evidence of Responsible AI’s impact is its global embrace. Governments, multinationals, international agencies, civil society, indigenous groups, youth movements, and even the Vatican have all recognized its importance and developed frameworks to guide it. The fact that AI governance remains a central global debate, and that the builders of technology are increasingly being held accountable demonstrates how Responsible AI has already made a difference and continues to play a defining role as we collaborate and co-create our future with AI. We are all still here, doing this good work, because Responsible AI provides the framework, the language, and the vision to keep pushing for systems that are just, ethical, and sustainable.
In AI governance, there are often competing priorities (privacy vs. safety, open source/transparency vs. closed source/security, etc). How do you approach making decisions while weighing these value trade-offs?
My work is at the intersection of intelligence innovation and human responsibility. AI governance is not a technical afterthought; it is the defining debate of our age. It is a web of trade-offs: privacy vs. safety, openness vs. security, innovation vs. accountability. Through it all, one truth remains for me, and as a criminologist: justice must be the lens. Justice asks: Who benefits? Who bears the risk? Who protects the vulnerable? The future of intelligence cannot belong to a single voice or a single industry. It must be forged through dialogue across disciplines, cultures, and generations. I believe in the imagination of AI. But I believe even more in the imagination of people. If we dare to reimagine our world with AI, we must also reimagine oversight, accountability, vigilance, and above all, justice. The nations, organizations, and communities that get Responsible AI governance right will define the next era of competitiveness, trust, excellence, human dignity, and human existence.