HAL: Who Signed Off on This?

About HAL: Who Signed Off on This?

Every AI decision inside a company eventually lands on someone's desk with a pen. HAL: Who Signed Off on This? is a series of short conversations with the people who sign: how they decide what to approve, where they insist a human still looks, and what they'd need to see before they'd trust a machine with more. (HAL is the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the AI that went rogue. The show is about the people who make sure that never happens on their watch.)

Publisher

Christopher Sowa

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

10 Sept 2026

Latest episode

10 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

5 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   10 Oct 2026

   Healthcare AI Governance: Who Owns the Data? Jim Sinkoff, Sun River Health

   Jim Sinkoff of Sun River Health on healthcare AI governance, data ownership, and who answers when it goes wrong. Sun River serves 240,000 patients across 50 sites in Greater New York, and Jim also runs Solutions for Community Health, a company that deploys AI for community clinics nationwide, so he sits on both sides of the table as buyer and seller. His starting point for AI governance: if your organization is the one that gets sued after a breach, then it's your data. Everything follows from that. Contracts that say so. Bi-directional feeds so your data comes back. Verification before any tool goes live. Also in this episode: Who is responsible if an AI moves $100,000: the controller, the SVP of finance, the CFO and the bank, with the CIO on the second line. Not just the IT guy. What AI can read on staff screens: administratively, everything, once a copilot is launched. Clinically, very little, and why the API layer around the EHR is the point to watch. Robots outside the EHR: how Sun River automates claims billing without letting the automation live inside the clinical record. The denial arms race between payers and providers, and the regulatory circuit breakers that still limit it. "All in on AI" with three conditions: policy, security, and co-creation rather than off-the-shelf. Why he still writes longhand, types his own email, and thinks AI is a new species standing next to us. HAL: Who Signed Off On This? is hosted by Chris Sowa. To be a guest: https://calendly.com/chris-sowa-redactsure/30min

2. 

   8 Oct 2026

   Need to Know: AI and Student Records, with Dr. Judy White

   Dr. Judy White ran Riverside County's schools, 430,000 students, after 42 years as a counselor, principal and district superintendent across the Inland Empire. Her rule for student files is simple: if it's not needed to know, take it out. The question in 2026 is whether that rule can survive AI. Everything about a student that once sat in separate file cabinets now lives in one record: academics, health, discipline, what's happening at home. That record is what makes AI useful to an overloaded teacher, and what makes it something to handle with care. Her word for where school leaders stand is "quandary." Dr. White walks through the decisions that still belong to a person. AI can surface a pattern of referrals going back years. It will not tell you what is going on in that student's life outside school. The superintendent remains the seat of appeal, and the real question is whether the district noticed the child with his head on the desk before anything escalated. Also in this episode: the team-around-one-student model and why what they learn stays in the room; districts forced to buy their own data back from ransomware; why teachers aren't getting enough AI training and what it costs to fix; social media policy as the rehearsal for AI policy; and the classroom where students found the hallucinations themselves and wrote their own rules. Dr. White now leads MOSAIC, a nonprofit for racial healing and student scholarships, and serves with Think Transcend, which develops superintendents through the Transcendent Leader Institute (thinktranscend.org). HAL: Who Signed Off On This? is hosted by Chris Sowa. To be a guest: https://calendly.com/chris-sowa-redactsure/30min

3. 

   24 Sept 2026

   AI in College Athletics: Governance, Athlete Data & Security with Tom Livers

   AI is already changing college athletics—but what happens when it moves beyond game film and starts touching athlete performance data, medical information, recruiting, ticketing and operational systems? In this episode of HAL: Who Signed Off on This?, host Chris Sowa talks with Tom Livers, Associate Athletic Director for IT Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about what AI looks like from inside a major college athletic department. HAL_Chris_Tom Tom's team supports far more than computers. UNC Athletics runs roughly 280 events per year, including football games with more than 50,000 attendees and basketball games with more than 21,000. His team helps support ticketing, public safety, concessions, merchandising, broadcast systems, replay technology and the infrastructure behind the fan experience. HAL_Chris_Tom The conversation explores how AI could change that environment, including: AI-powered video analysis that can identify plays, players and game events almost instantly Combining data from athlete wearables to analyze performance and potentially identify injury risk Where athlete data crosses into sensitive educational or medical information How FERPA, privacy offices and data-governance teams affect what new technology can access Why public roster information is very different from private performance or health information The risk of sensitive athletic information creating an advantage for competitors—or even betting markets Why some critical systems, such as ticketing, are intentionally isolated from broader internet access What happens when technology fails in the middle of a live sporting event Why completely banning AI inside an organization may simply push employees to use consumer AI tools outside the organization's controls Tom describes UNC's approach as a more practical middle ground: establish governance, determine which tools are permitted, and keep institutional data inside appropriately controlled environments rather than assuming employees simply will not use AI. HAL_Chris_Tom He also sees significant upside. AI-based video analysis could reduce hours of manual game-film work to seconds and eventually may be able to identify movement patterns associated with injury risk. HAL_Chris_Tom The central question remains the one behind every episode of HAL: When AI gets access to the data and starts influencing the decision, who signed off on it? Guest: Tom Livers, Associate Athletic Director for IT Services, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Host: Chris Sowa Podcast: HAL: Who Signed Off on This?

4. 

   23 Sept 2026

   The AI Delegation Frontier

   How much authority should enterprises delegate to AI—and where should humans remain firmly in control? In this episode of HAL: Who Signed Off on This?, host Chris Sowa speaks with Harry Ghuman, CEO of Alpha Decisions and a former senior executive at Oracle and Palo Alto Networks, about moving beyond AI experimentation toward measurable business value. HAL_Chris_Harry Harry argues that an enterprise is ultimately a collection of decisions and as AI agents become capable of making and executing more of those decisions, organizations need to define what authority AI actually has. The challenge is not only cybersecurity; it is governance, accountability and control. Chris and Harry discuss: Why hundreds of AI pilots may still produce little measurable business value How to identify the business processes and bottlenecks where AI can create real economic impact Why AI authority should be designed around specific processes and decisions The difference between experimentation and consequential AI deployment Why "human in the loop" is not a complete governance strategy Harry's concept of the AI delegation frontier—what organizations should delegate to AI and what they should not Why human judgment remains especially important for highly consequential decisions The risk of eliminating entry-level roles that develop tomorrow's experienced decision-makers The central question is no longer simply, "Can AI do this?" It is: "Who gave it the authority—and should we?" Harry describes the delegation frontier as determining what can safely be delegated to agents while reserving the most consequential decisions for human judgment.

5. 

   10 Sept 2026

   The Show for the Leaders Who Sign Off on AI

   Rogue AI's have been breaking into companies (like hugging face), committing acts of deception, and yet no one seems to be accountable for the AI Agents we are using at work. In this opening episode, host Chris Sowa explains what HAL: Who Signed Off on This? is about, why the show is named after the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the three things every leader who puts AI to work has to do, and the three questions every guest gets: If an AI moved $100,000 out of your organization tomorrow, who is responsible? Do you know what AI can read off your people's screens right now? If an agent acted on a record last week, could you show who let it, what it saw, and who approved it? Deciding where AI should go, what decisions it should be allowed to make, and even what it should see. This show is for the executive leaders who make the key decisions about AI and answer for them: CFOs, CIOs and CISOs, CEOs, heads of claims, school and university leaders, and founders. If that is you, consider this your invitation to join us as a guest. Chris Sowa spent 30 years at IBM, SAP, Oracle, Accenture and Schneider Electric helping large companies through the last generation of technology shifts, and ran AI companies before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. He is co-founder of RedactSure, an AI controls, governance and privacy company.

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.