Good morning. For more than 120 years, UL has put its mark on products from tree lights to toaster cords to convey a promise: This won’t kill you. Last week, for the first time, the $3 billion-a-year safety science company issued a new certification for AI-embedded products. As UL Solutions CEO Jennifer Scanlon told me: “Innovation without safety is failure.”
Rarely has there been a technology that’s evolved so fast with so little oversight. (The patchwork of emerging state laws adds to the confusion.) This week, the spotlight is on OpenClaw, the autonomous virtual agent that’s spawned a new craze in China. It got a shout-out from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his developers conference this week, where he announced NemoClaw and declared OpenClaw framework to be “the next ChatGPT.”
Can private-sector safety standards do what Washington has not: provide guardrails to fast-moving technologies with potentially profound consequences? The UL mark already goes on about 22 billion products worldwide every year. This latest standard, UL 3115, evaluates whether an AI-enabled product is safe, robust and well-governed with a “human in control” throughout a product’s lifecycle. “Whether or not there’s government regulation around this, our customers are coming to us because they need broader protections and assurances,” Scanlon told me. “They’re clamoring to have at least a standard that they can adhere to that gives them the confidence in how they’re getting out in front of their customers.”
UL’s expertise is in functional safety. As Scanlon puts it: “When you turn the radio on in your car, you do not want your brakes to slam. So how is that embedded software being tested and proven? They’re embedding AIs in toys. How do we know those toys are safe for kids?”
That’s why UL’s AI Center of Excellence set out to apply its safety protocols to the new world of AI-embedded physical products. “We start with an outline of investigation, which is a precursor to safety. That’s our engineers and scientists working with customers to understand what they’re worried about, what they believe the challenges are—and then we come at it from the scientific perspective, which is: what else should you worry about?”
“In the case of AI‑embedded products, they started thinking about: How transparent is the algorithm? How much bias is built into those algorithms? What’s the veracity of the training data? And if some of that training data is not true, how do you eliminate it from the learning model? And type of human oversight and verification—that essential final check—is in place? What are those processes?”
Thus far, two products have been AI‑certified: Qcells’ Energy Management System, an AI-enabled control engine for data centers, and the Omniconn Platform 4.0, a smart building solution. It’s one part of the puzzle in a world where leaders are trying to match speed with safety.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at [email protected]
Top leadership news
Fortune Brands CEO leaves job with $18.4 million before his start date
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The war in Iran is bringing a new threat to corporate America: retaliatory cyber attacks. One Fortune 500 company has already been targeted by Iran-aligned hackers, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Delta CEO demands pay for TSA workers, end to partial government shutdown
Delta CEO Ed Bastian called the ongoing partial government “inexcusable” this week during an appearance on CNBC as TSA agents are left without paychecks. “We got a war going on. Let’s get our people, that are people that are essential to our security, paid,” Bastian added.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are down 0.3%, following a 1.4% drop on Wednesday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 is down 3.4%, South Korea’s KOSPI is down 2.7%, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index is down 2.0%. Taiwan’s Taiex dropped 1.9% and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 dropped 1.7%. India’s NIFTY 50 is down 2.8%, the STOXX Europe 600 is down 1.6% in early trading. Bitcoin plunged to around $70,000.
Around the watercooler
Social media companies are scrambling to verify minors online. Congress just made it a lot more complicated by Catherina Gioino
The national debt just crossed $39 trillion—almost doubling since Trump vowed to erase it by Nick Lichtenberg
Today’s Bob Iger’s last day leading Disney. Here’s what comes next at the company worth $176 billion by Jacqueline Munis
It’s almost inexplicable why oil prices aren’t much higher. But here’s why markets are ‘resilient’ so far despite the biggest energy supply shock ever by Jordan Blum
Goldman Sachs says small businesses are embracing AI, but fewer than 1 in 5 are good at actually integrating it by Tristan Bove
Today’s edition of CEO Daily was compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Nicholas Gordon and Lee Clifford.
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