Sai Santhankrishnan
Speaker Tagline: Founder, Periculum | AI Governance, Cybersecurity & Risk Advisor | ISO 42001 · CISM · CRISC
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Sailakshmi "Sai" Santhanakrishnan is Founder and Principal Advisor of Periculum LLC, a boutique AI governance, cybersecurity and integrated-risk advisory, and creator of the 6A Compass™ methodology. She has spent 20+ years building risk programs at SIFI and enterprise-platform scale, including senior roles at Amazon (AWS, Alexa), BNY Mellon and The Hartford. She holds ISO 42001, CISM, CRISC and CDPSE credentials, is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar, and co-authored The CISO Mentor. She is co-founder of WeInspire.Guru, a Board Member of Empowering Women as Leaders, and has mentored 25+ emerging leaders in AI and cyber risk.
Area of Expertise
Trust Is the Product: Governing AI in Public Services
When a public agency uses AI, the stakeholder isn't a customer who can switch providers. It's a citizen who can't. That raises the bar on explainability, fairness, transparency and vendor accountability, and it often has to be met with small teams and tight budgets.
This session brings together perspectives from government technology leadership, audit and risk, and AI delivery. It covers what responsible AI looks like in practice: building an AI inventory, classifying use cases by risk, deciding which use cases should not proceed, disclosing AI use to residents, and governing AI that arrives embedded in vendor software. The discussion draws on NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001 and emerging state AI laws.
You'll leave with:
• A five-step starter roadmap for public-sector AI governance
• The vendor questions to ask before the next contract renewal
• A transparency checklist for citizen-facing AI
Who Approved That Agent? Governing Agentic AI in Regulated Industries
In regulated industries, "the AI did it" is not an acceptable answer to an auditor, a regulator or a customer. Yet agentic systems now trigger workflows, call APIs and take actions on their own. The audit question has shifted from "who accessed the system?" to "which agent acted, why, and under what authority?" Most identity, logging and control environments were never built to answer that.
Drawing on 20+ years building risk programs in SIFI banking and at enterprise cloud scale, Sai shares a practical six-phase governance loop (Align, Assess, Architect, Activate, Assure, Adapt). It puts guardrails, human-in-the-loop boundaries and audit evidence around autonomous agents without stalling delivery.
Agenda: Why agents break traditional controls · The governance loop applied to one agent, end to end · Where it fails in practice (permissions, logging, escalation) · Checklist walkthrough and Q&A
You'll leave with:
• Five questions to test whether an agent is ready for a regulated environment
• Where agent permissions, logging and escalation paths typically break
• A free one-page control checklist mapped to ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act
Holding the Line: Women Leading Responsible AI in Regulated Industries
Responsible AI is decided inside organizations, in the moments when someone asks "should we ship this?" This panel brings together women building and governing AI across banking, healthcare, the public sector and technology. They'll discuss how they raise risk concerns so leadership acts, build credibility without an inherited network, handle the gap between AI ambition and compliance reality, and use mentorship to grow the next generation of leaders.
Moderated by Sai Santhanakrishnan, who has led risk, compliance and privacy for a major consumer AI platform and in SIFI banking, and co-founded the WeInspire.Guru mentorship platform.
You'll leave with:
• Practical ways to raise AI risk upward so it gets acted on
• Career lessons from four different regulated sectors
• Ideas for building a support network across borders and industries
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