AI Governance: Ethics, Agents & the Human Question with Catie Sheret, Oliver Patel & Peter Lee

🎙️Alex and Tom step aside for this one — handing the mic to their friend Catie Sheret (General Counsel at Cambridge University Press & Assessment), who hosts a rich three-way conversation with Oliver Patel (Head of Enterprise AI Governance at AstraZeneca) and Peter Lee (Partner at Simmons & Simmons). Three very different vantage points — converging on the same question: how do you actually make AI governance work in practice?

What begins with a definitional exercise (what is AI governance, anyway?) quickly evolves. Oliver draws a sharp line between AI ethics, responsible AI, AI governance and AI safety as related but distinct disciplines — and makes a passionate case that governance is fundamentally change management, not compliance theatre. Peter describes the "golden thread" he sees in the best organisations: corporate philosophy flowing from the boardroom right down into the tools people use every day. Catie grounds everything in context — arguing that your principles only stick when they're anchored to what your organisation actually does: content IP at Cambridge, medical ethics at AstraZeneca etc.

The conversation builds through the practical mechanics — use case assessment, vendor oversight, committee structures, crisis preparation — before arriving at the question everyone's wrestling with: agentic AI. Peter frames it as a mindset shift from "can we trust the output?" to "what actions can this system initiate?" Oliver goes further: the fundamental logic of agentic AI, he argues, is to take the human out of the loop — and organisations need to confront that honestly rather than pretending otherwise.

There's a wonderful thread on human flourishing running throughout — Peter's insistence that philosophers have never been more important, Oliver's pride in AstraZeneca's "Thriving in the Age of AI" literacy programme, and a closing round of book recommendations that ranges from Richard Susskind's How to Think About AI to Jenny O'Dell's How to Do Nothing (Oliver's brilliantly contrarian pick about the importance of stepping away from screens entirely) to Governing the Machine by Ray Eitel-Porter, Paul Dongha, Miriam Vogel.

It's a masterclass in how to think about governance as something that enables rather than constrains — hosted with warmth and real expertise by Catie.

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