ZEISS Responsible AI Day 2026: Panel on Agentic AI

„What does Responsible AI mean to you?"

Before we start the day, we were asking everyone who registered. We got 837 words back: Transparency. Compliance. Data Protection. Security. Trust. Ethics. Accountability. Fairness.

The word cloud tells us where the collective attention already lives, and where the room is coming from before a single speaker takes the stage.

This opening question set the tone for the first-ever ZEISS Responsible AI Day, an internal event I helped shape and host at ZEISS, bringing together colleagues from across the group and expert voices from outside the company to move Responsible AI from principle to practice in the starting era of agentic AI.

The panel I got to moderate: „Agentic AI: Diverse Perspectives on AI Responsibility and Innovation." Four experts, deliberately curated for the angles they bring to the room:

• Head of Digital Transformation Management, ZEISS (SMT), who stands for the industrial line, where AI meets high-stakes precision manufacturing.

• Head of Technical Sales Security, Compliance, Identity & Cloud Endpoint, Microsoft, who brings her expertise from the platform layer, where the tools we deploy are being built.

• The Group Data Protection Officer of the Hartmann Group. The data protection perspective from another regulated industry and the thesis that the human in the loop is dead.

• Head of Business Information Security Enablement, ZEISS (CIT). The internal security and enablement angle, who talks about not a single sleepless night when facing thousands of agents potentially being created by ZEISS employees in 2026.

The thesis running through the conversation: agentic AI increases both the opportunities and the risks of AI. In doing so, it elevates the strategic imperative of AI governance. What we accepted as residual risk in classical ML applications doesn't translate one-to-one to systems that plan, decide, and act with increasing autonomy. The governance question moves from „what did the model do?" to „what did the system decide, and did it have the authority to?"

A first-of-its-kind day like this at a global technology company doesn't organize itself. Huge thanks to my Responsible AI colleagues who made it happen. And to every ZEISS colleague and external expert who chose to spend a day thinking, talking, discussing with us about the AI we're building.

If your organization is asking „What does Responsible AI mean to us?" — what's the format that gets you the honest answers?