AI is transforming our world at breathtaking speed and scale – reshaping economies, redefining possibilities, and raising profound questions about trust, fairness, and accountability. As organisations face massive challenges by the disruptive power of AI, a critical challenge emerges:
How can we build systems that are not just powerful, but also responsible?
In the wake of the AFTER THE ALGORITHM festival, SCRAI invited for an afternoon of insight, dialogue, and action with business leaders, policymakers, changemakers, and AI builders.
Keynotes
Experts from SCRAI shared their latest insights in inspirational keynotes, looking at Responsible AI through the five different lenses:
Business: The Power of AI and its Challenges for Economy & Society (Ivo Ruckstuhl)
Technology: Engineering Responsible AI Systems (Anika Hannemann)
Legal: Legal Responses to the Challenges Caused by AI (Stephanie Volz)
Collaboration: How Do People and Teams Work with AI? (Thomas Schmalfeldt)
Design: Responsible AI by Design: Methods, Practices and Perspectives (Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken)
Breakout Sessions
In the breakout sessions, we had the opportunity to discuss real-world problems for organisations on their way to Responsible AI.
To kick-off the group work, we started with self-assessments about the maturity of our own organisations in respect to Responsible AI. After that, we explored actual challenges our organisations face along three dimensions (non-exhaustive list):
Business & Organisation: strategic alignment and AI investments, managerial oversight, business models, innovation vs. responsibility, process management, AI & data governance, regulators, risk management, ROI & creating business value from AI.
People & Culture: AI-human collaboration, AI literacy & upskilling, new workflows & team work, organisational behaviour, change management.
Data & Technology: AI bias & transparency, data protection, data quality, privacy & copyright issues, IT bottlenecks & legacy, sovereignty.
Panel & Plenary Session
The final plenary session was moderated by SCRAI's Ricardo Chavarriaga. The panel featured our SCRAI keynote speakers that were ready to tackle open questions, discuss practical approaches, acknowledging limitations, and show pathways for AI systems to become more responsible in the future. In our final conversation, we discussed key insights from the breakout sessions and raised some fundamental questions. Clearly, AI is a key technology and disruptive force for business and society. Not only is there tension between innovation and responsibility. There are challenges concerning global competition, economy, politics, businesses & organisations, society, education, and the human condition. For some challenges we can already provide solution approaches while others must still be better understood and solved together.
Responsible AI is a demanding journey for all of us to shape. There is much at stake for economy and society. Together, we can help companies and organisations to build better, trustworthy AI systems.
A big thank you to all attendees to be part of the conversation and engage with us on the mission to Build AI We Can Trust.
Please see also the excellent coverage and insightful comments from participants on LinkedIn:
Andreas M. Walker
Wir diskutieren Responsible AI - ohne zu wissen, welche Zukunft wir als Gesellschaft wollen
Manja Pfeiffer
I spent an insightful afternoon at the "What is Responsible AI?" event in Zürich yesterday, hosted by SCRAI - Swiss Centre for Responsible AI as part of the After The Algorithm, a 10-day festival.
Julia Loose
Responsible AI isn't a Checkbox - It's an Operating Model.
Simon Schmid
«Bist du höflicher zu Siri als zu deiner Familie?»
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Building AI We Can Trust - SCRAI @ AFTER THE ALGORITHM Festival, 23-March-2026
