Research Seminar by Professor Neil Pollock

Department : Accounting and Management Control

Speaker : Neil POLLOCK (University of Edinburgh)

Room : Building V Ramanantsoa 

Zoom link:  https://hec-fr.zoom.us/j/95284434291

“Can AI Govern AI? The Visions, Instruments, and Practices of the AI Assurance Industry”

Abstract:

This presentation explores the emerging field of “AI assurance”—the attempt to make artificial intelligence systems auditable, accountable, and trustworthy. Drawing on ethnographic research in healthcare, we trace how AI vendors, clinicians, and specialist assurance firms struggle to define what counts as evidence and who has the authority to judge AI performance. The phenomenon of AI drift—where systems lose accuracy or fairness after deployment—exposes the instability of evidence and challenges traditional, retrospective audit models. Using ideas from science and technology studies (STS), especially the notion of the “trajectory of evidence” (Kruse, 2015), and interdisciplinary accounting (Power, 2022), we show how assurance work involves the continual stabilisation and recontextualisation of evidence to sustain credibility over time. We argue that AI assurance marks a mutation of audit practice, moving from episodic verification to continuous, anticipatory oversight—and raising the possibility that automated systems might one day audit or monitor each other. In addressing whether and how AI might govern AI, the presentation reflects on the limits of human expertise, the redistribution of authority, and the reconfiguration of credibility in the emerging infrastructures of algorithmic accountability.

Neil Pollock is Professor of Innovation and Social Informatics at the University of Edinburgh studying the emerging AI assurance industry. His books include Putting the University Online, Software and Organisations, How Industry Analysts Shape the Digital Future, and the edited collections Thinking Infrastructures and Market Studies. He has recently completed a further book After Hype: The Business of Taming the Digital Economy, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in June 2026. He is Deputy Editor‑in‑Chief of Information and Organisation , serves on the editorial boards of Accounting, Organizations and Society and Organization Studies, advises the UK Cabinet Office on Digital, Data, Innovation and AI Skills and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences; his work has been recognised with the EGOS 2022 James G. March Prize and a 2023 Best Paper award.