Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Advanced AI Society, building the security verification ecosystem that lets people trust AI. She argues that AI security is the precondition for AI strategy: no enterprise can safely deploy autonomous agents it cannot prove control over. A sociologist and tech ethnographer, she coined “thick data” and “quantification bias,” the frames a generation of executives use to think about data. Now she is naming the Verifiability Gap that AI agents have made urgent. Her TED talk on big data and human insight has shaped decision-making at Fortune 500 companies including Google, Spotify, and P&G. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Fortune, Wired, and The Guardian. She is a Global Expert on AI and data at Singularity University.
She founded Sudden Compass, the consulting firm that brought thick data to Fortune 500 executive teams. She co-founded CRADL (Crypto Research and Design Lab) in partnership with the World Economic Forum, a lab she later exited to the Crypto Council for Innovation. Her earlier career spanned NASA and Nokia. She writes op-eds on technology, governance, and the future of human judgment. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology, advises venture capital firms including Dangerous Ventures on AI strategy, and is affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Atlantic Council.
Her career has crossed the frontiers of three technology waves and named the human stakes inside each one. As a tech ethnographer at Nokia, she watched the world’s largest cellphone company miss a market shift she tried to warn them about, one unfolding in China. The experience shaped a career-long commitment: to make sure enterprises, governments, and societies do not miss what matters next. Against the prevailing tech mystique of every era, she has argued that human insight is what catches what the dashboards cannot see. The argument took the form of thick data when the wave was big data. It took the form of designing for people in the wave of crypto. Now it takes the form of the control and verification that let companies deploy autonomous agents without losing the humans in the loop.
One argument holds across every role, from NASA to Nokia, from boardrooms to rural fieldwork, from tech labs to AI governance. Her work cuts against the prevailing story that humans are a cost to be automated away. She makes the opposite case: as machine intelligence gets cheaper, human judgment becomes the scarce resource, and she shows leaders exactly where it belongs.
Learn more at triciawang.com.