Axios Event: Company leaders are balancing trust, speed and security in AI strategies

NEW YORK – Companies are becoming better equipped to put safeguards in place to quickly deploy AI without sacrificing security, but trust remains paramount to success, attendees said at a roundtable discussion event at Axios' annual AI+ Summit.

• Axios' Ashley Gold and Scott Rosenberg moderated the June 4 discussion, sponsored by Booking Holdings.

What they're saying: "When you think about payments, it all begins with trust – for consumers to trust you with their information, or merchants to accept the payment," said John Froese, senior vice president and general manager of large enterprise for North America at PayPal.

The big picture: As the AI ecosystem grows and models improve in quality, so do tools allowing enterprises to put up the right protections, Froese said.

• "The balance between growth as well as security is starting to become there, and that's why you're starting to see the discussions about agentic commerce and things like this," he said.
• "Certainly there will be bad actors, but there are the tools in place that think about your brand and think about your consumer to be able to … move forward with intelligence."

Driving the news: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI's growing power poses an existential threat to jobs – and the government and companies are unaware of what the effects will be.

• "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei told Axios.
• Tech:NYC president and CEO Julie Samuels added: "Clearly, the market is catching up with this dynamic in the way that companies think that they benefit in the marketplace to put safety first."

State of play: Many companies are feeling pressure from leadership to move more quickly on AI, with an often unspoken mandate to prioritize speed over safe deployment.

• "I've noticed that you can do it quickly but also put great guardrails on it," said Insight Partners managing director George Mathew.

• "If you make the deliberate choice to move quickly, and your board is asking you to move quickly, you can still put good, safe, trusted guardrails around how you get to production. I think saying it's one or the other is actually not true."

Yes, but: Trust in systems can very easily be broken, said Jerry Levine, ContractPodAi general counsel and chief evangelist.

• Companies that were once highly trusted can lose it all if they do something wrong, he said. "Thinking about that, if I'm using a payment provider and all my data is being leaked onto the internet, how can I use that payment provider again?"
• Levine is very focused on making sure customers' data is stored securely for that very reason.
• "In lieu of a regulatory structure that gives you specific rules, what you end up doing is mirroring other regulatory structures in order not to lose that concept of trust, because it's almost impossible to regain that trust once it's lost."