An AWSM LABS Experience
Invitation-only · New YorkAI MRNGS
Private conversations at the frontier of AI and everything it touches.
One question. Ninety minutes. Off the record.
The kind of question
“Should executives be personally accountable for decisions an AI agent makes?”
Unrecorded and off the record. Ideas travel, names don't.
Why this format
Most rooms pick a lane — founders talking to founders, executives talking to executives, one function talking to itself. AI MRNGS is built differently: one consequential question, explored for ninety minutes by a small group of senior leaders and cross-domain thinkers who rarely sit at the same table. Not a panel of speeches. Not a networking breakfast with a topic attached. A room built to think together.
“Private” is already claimed.
Breakfasts, dinners and closed-door roundtables are everywhere in New York. A closed door is not, by itself, a reason to give up a morning.
“Executive” is already claimed.
C-suite and board audiences have plenty of rooms. Seniority alone does not make a conversation worth having.
Interdisciplinary depth is the opening.
A question bounded enough to explore in an hour, and important enough that people from different fields sharpen each other by being in the same room. Small enough for candor. Senior enough for consequence.
How it works
One question, three movements.
The question
Consequential, bounded, contested, interdisciplinary, current — and human enough to hold over breakfast. No topic list: one sharp question the room can genuinely penetrate in an hour.
Ninety minutes
Arrival and framing, a moderated exchange among the anchors, then the table joins. The moderator pushes for contradictions and changed minds — not consensus.
After the table
The conversation stays unrecorded. What is shared afterward is what changed in the room — never who said it.
Program components
What makes it a working session.
Executive-level convening
A small table of senior leaders and cross-domain thinkers, curated for range — not a mixer, not a panel audience.
01Participant-led inquiry
The question is shaped in dialogue with the room ahead of time. It comes from what participants are actually grappling with, not a pre-set curriculum.
02Anchored discussion
Three anchors — an intellectual voice, a senior operator, and someone close to the frontier — open the exchange before the wider table joins.
03Peer sharing
The table's own experience is the content. The moderator pushes for contradictions and changed minds, not consensus.
04A confidentiality compact
Unrecorded, off the record. What travels afterward is what changed in the room — never who said it.
05Invitation-only · New York, with Los Angeles, Miami and Boston to follow · Hosted by Fritz Desir
The kind of question
One at a time, never a topic list.
Should executives be personally accountable for decisions an AI agent makes?
Governance, liability, and where judgment still has to be human.
What happens to trust in an institution once its decisions are partly automated?
Banking, medicine, hiring — the accountability gap AI is opening everywhere.
Is the AI talent war actually a capital allocation problem?
Where VC and PE money is really placing its bets.
Who owns the output of an AI system trained on someone else's work?
IP, attribution, and the legal frontier no court has fully settled.
What does leadership look like when judgment is partly outsourced?
What AI is quietly changing about what leaders are for.
The invitees
Built around one profile.
Leaders accountable for people
CEOs, COOs, and the leaders who answer for people — CHRO, CLO, CIO / CTO / CAIO, General Counsel — deploying AI at scale and wanting to get it right, not just get it done.
Founders, product and capital
Founders, product leaders, and VC / PE investors carrying the same question from a different seat.
Thought leaders
Academics, authors and researchers whose work reframes how the room thinks about the question.
Frontier voices
Scientists, policy thinkers, journalists and builders working at the edge of what AI can currently do.
Invitation-only · New York
We're building the founding table.
AI MRNGS starts in New York, with Los Angeles, Miami and Boston to follow. Happy to walk through the format, the anchor model, and how to be part of the founding room.