Darktrace CEO Poppy Gustafsson on her AI Safety Summit goals | Computer Weekly

▤ Summary

Poppy Gustafsson describes the past 10 years as “exhilarating”, but when asked if, when she helped set up Darktrace in 2013, she ever thought in her wildest dreams that she would have the ear of prime ministers and presidents, she says she would much rather look forward than back. As CEO one of the UK’s most prominent pioneers in the field and sitting pretty at the intersection of cyber security and AI, the stars have truly aligned for Gustafsson and Darktrace in 2023, and she has a lot to say on these issues. “That’s what we were designed to protect against.” Arriving at Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire country estate – since consumed by the suburbs of Milton Keynes – where the Allies cracked the Nazis’ Enigma and Lorenz ciphers, Gustafsson brings a threefold agenda to the table. We can’t afford to entirely outsource our challenges to AI and lose our skills” “Our product is taking actions within a business entirely autonomously to interrupt in-progress cyber incidents … [so] the security teams really have to trust that the technology is doing the right thing. I can relate, I have context.’ That’s what I mean, it’s showing your working.” Ahead of the AI Summit, a range of voices from civil society – including the likes of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the Open Rights Group (ORG), Mozilla, Amnesty International and Tim Berners-Lee’s Open Data Institute – criticised the government for excluding groups most likely to be affected by AI, branding the event a closed shop dominated by big tech and saying it was a “missed opportunity”.

▦ Linked Companies

Darktrace

$250M to $500M