Governance
Most of what goes wrong with AI will look like an institution failing slowly.
I advise public institutions and senior decision-makers across Europe and North America on AI adoption and the institutional change it brings. In practice that means the EU AI Act and the governance debate, and a corpus of regulatory, policy, and institutional texts I read with my own tools.
I come to it as an art historian and cultural researcher, after a decade inside the universities, museums, and archives that decide what knowledge survives. The risks I work on are the structural ones the misalignment frame underweights: epistemic erosion, model collapse, the concentration of interpretive power. The alignment work matters, and these sit underneath it. I think the people who study how institutions hold knowledge belong where the rules get written.
Lines of work
The work keeps returning to the same questions.
What still counts as proof once anything can be generated. AI dissolves the origin of what it makes, and governance has to decide what a society will still accept as evidence.
What these systems remember, and what they let us forget. A training corpus is a cultural-memory institution now, and what goes into it is a governance question long before it is a copyright one.
How institutions absorb a contested technology, and why most adoption stalls. The failure is rarely the technology itself, more often the organization around it.
What I can do
I work as a writer and an advisor. In practice, that takes a few forms:
- Policy and position writing. Research-grade analysis on AI governance and the EU AI Act, in English and German, under my name or an organisation’s.
- Briefings and decision papers. The regulation and the risks at the length a leadership meeting actually reads, written so a board can act on it.
- Orientation. I help a company or an institution work out where AI belongs in what they do, and where it does not. Often the most useful outcome is ruling things out early.
- Adoption and change. Why AI projects fail inside institutions, and what makes them hold.
- Talks and teaching. Lectures for leadership and for the public, from executive briefings to museum stages.
Why adoption fails inside institutions, as an interactive investigation: Who Killed the AI Project? →
If any of this is useful to you, I am easy to reach.
I answer my own mail.
stenreiss@gmail.com