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Deirdre Ahern

Publications and source records attributed to Deirdre Ahern.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Directors Duties in the Age of Agentic Artificial Intelligence

As boards engage with the adoption of Artificial Intelligence including agentic AI to drive operational efficiencies, this presents new opportunities for profit maximisation. AI adoption is increasingly identified with employee role displacement and in companies, and the interests of employees as stakeholders require exploration. A novel question posed is whether in an age of AI ascendancy AI may warrant being given stakeholder status as its role in the company approximates or eclipses that of human employees. The article probes four distinct models of corporate purpose within the duty on directors to act in the best interests of the company, the shareholder primacy model, the Enlightened Shareholder value model, the stakeholder friendly model, and the stakeholder value model, highlighting the available scope for directors to accommodate the interests of employees around AI adoption in decision-making by boards around AI. It is concluded that given the degree to which directors are insulated from legal scrutiny in relation to their best interests duty, adopting a wider law in context approach to promote employee welfare would serve the interests of employees, directors and companies alike. This would see directors engaging meaningfully with employees and providing opportunities for reskilling to adapt to the age of AI.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2025

Operationalising AI Regulatory Sandboxes under the EU AI Act: The Triple Challenge of Capacity, Coordination and Attractiveness to Providers

The EU AI Act provides a rulebook for all AI systems being put on the market or into service in the European Union. This article investigates the requirement under the AI Act that Member States establish national AI regulatory sandboxes for testing and validation of innovative AI systems under regulatory supervision to assist with fostering innovation and complying with regulatory requirements. Against the backdrop of the EU objective that AI regulatory sandboxes would both foster innovation and assist with compliance, considerable challenges are identified for Member States around capacity-building and design of regulatory sandboxes. While Member States are early movers in laying the ground for national AI regulatory sandboxes, the article contends that there is a risk that differing approaches being taken by individual national sandboxes could jeopardise a uniform interpretation of the AI Act and its application in practice. This could motivate innovators to play sandbox arbitrage. The article therefore argues that the European Commission and the AI Board need to act decisively in developing rules and guidance to ensure a cohesive, coordinated approach in national AI regulatory sandboxes. With sandbox participation being voluntary, the possibility that AI regulatory sandboxes may prove unattractive to innovators on their compliance journey is also explored. Confidentiality concerns, the inability to relax legal rules during the sandbox, and the inability of sandboxes to deliver a presumption of conformity with the AI Act are identified as pertinent concerns for innovators contemplating applying to AI regulatory sandboxes as compared with other direct compliance routes provided to them through application of harmonised standards and conformity assessment procedures.

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arXiv2025

The New Anticipatory Governance Culture for Innovation: Regulatory Foresight, Regulatory Experimentation and Regulatory Learning

With the rapid pace of technological innovation, traditional methods of policy formation and legislating are becoming conspicuously anachronistic. The need for regulatory choices to be made to counter the deadening effect of regulatory lag is more important to developing markets and fostering growth than achieving one off regulatory perfection. This article advances scholarship on innovation policy and the regulation of technological innovation in the European Union. It does so by considering what building an agile yet robust anticipatory governance regulatory culture involves. It systematically excavates a variety of tools and elements that are being put into use in inventive ways and argues that these need to be more cohesively and systemically integrated into the regulatory toolbox. Approaches covered include strategic foresight, the critical embrace of iterative policy development and regulatory learning in the face of uncertainty and the embrace of bottom up approaches to cocreation of policy such as Policy Labs and the testing and regulatory learning through pilot regulation and experimentation. The growing use of regulatory sandboxes as an EU policy tool to boost innovation and navigate regulatory complexity as seen in the EU AI Act is also probed

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