In 2011, a machine beat the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, on live television. The machine was IBM Watson. The person who built Watson into a commercial product, who took it from a research project to the first AI system deployed at real scale inside real enterprises, is in this room today.

Since then, Watson has become a household name. AI has become the defining technology of our era. And the question that Manoj Saxena has spent the last several years asking, the question he insists is more important than any AI capability breakthrough, is this: How do you know if you can trust it?

Not philosophically. Legally. Operationally. Financially. When an AI system makes a decision that affects a customer, a patient, a loan applicant, or a soldier, who is accountable? How do you audit it? How do you govern it? How do you build AI that performs and that you can defend in a boardroom, a courtroom, or a congressional hearing?

That is the work of Trustwise, and of the Responsible AI Institute that Manoj founded alongside it. At a moment when the EU AI Act is creating compliance obligations for any company doing business in Europe, and when enterprise AI deployments are scaling faster than governance frameworks can keep up, Manoj's work is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a business imperative.

He has built and sold AI companies totaling $1.8 billion in exits. He served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. And he is arguably the person most qualified in the world to tell you what it means to build AI you can actually trust.