Founder & CEO, Optica Labs | 8+ Years AI Enablement, Implementation & Assurance | Building the Infrastructure Layer for Safe, Scalable AI
United States
33K followers
500+ connections
About
I work at the intersection of Applied AI, Agentic AI, AI Security, Enterprise Transformation and Commercial Scale — helping organizations move AI from experimentation into production while building the operating models, products and revenue engines required to scale.
My background blends technical AI, transformation and commercial execution.
Over the past decade, I’ve worked across the AI lifecycle: AI strategy, data, pre- and post-training, human-in-the-loop evaluation, multimodal AI, model testing, agentic systems, governance, security, observability and production readiness.
I’ve also built markets, products, GTM strategies, partnerships, teams and revenue engines — helping companies translate emerging technology into products customers will adopt and buy.
AI transformation is not just a technology problem. It is a product, operating model, risk, adoption and commercial problem.
I’m Co-Founder & CEO of Optica Labs, where we’re building adaptive AI assurance infrastructure for the agentic enterprise.
Our platform helps organizations:
Discover — identify AI use cases, models, applications and agents.
Align — connect AI to business value, policy, risk and regulation.
Design — architect agentic workflows around Access, Autonomy, Action and Accountability.
Test — evaluate what AI can say, access, decide and do.
Monitor — track runtime risk, drift, anomalous behavior and control failures.
Prove — generate evidence for readiness, governance and compliance.
Scale — increase adoption and autonomy based on performance and assurance evidence.
Underneath Optica is an AI-native assurance engine built to test AI with AI, combining multi-agent testing, adaptive algorithms, persona/threat/harm modeling, adversarial simulation, specialist assurance libraries and runtime intelligence.
Simulate → Test → Deploy → Observe → Learn → Retest.
Before Optica Labs, I led AI enablement and research strategy across programs spanning NLP, speech, vision, multilingual AI, data pipelines, model evaluation, responsible AI and human-in-the-loop systems.
My work has supported ecosystems including Amazon/AWS, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, HPE, Intel, Cohere, AI21, xAI and Salesforce.
I’m focused on one core question: how do we build increasingly capable AI systems — and turn them into real enterprise value, adoption and revenue?
My philosophy
Safety fuels innovation.
Trust enables adoption.
Adoption creates value.
I’m also the author of The Negotiation: AI, Power, and What It Means to Stay Human — forthcoming 2026 — and host of You & AI.
Articles by Tiarne
Activity
33K followers
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Tiarne Hawkins shared thisLast week in DC, IMPACT 250 put the people building America's next tech stack in the same rooms as the people writing its rules. Sovereign compute. Quantum. Energy for AI. Longevity science. An off-world industrial base. AI is leaving the lab and becoming infrastructure. Compute, power, data from orbit, all feeding systems that make real decisions for real people. That's the moment trust stops being a talking point. Infrastructure gets tested, verified and understood continuously, or it never gets used where it matters. Huge congrats to the Privateer Space team, who are killing it Brooke Bento Anita Kane Alana Marsili. An all-domain geospatial intelligence company. That fuses satellite, terrestrial, and maritime data with AI-driven analytics for government and commercial customers. The advantage isn't more data. It's turning signals across sea, land, and space into intelligence people can understand, trust, and act on. Thank you to the Host: Sinan Kanatsiz Kanatsiz (Internet Marketing Association) AI and compute: Keith StrierStrier and Sarah Badawi (AMD), Bruce Andrews (NVIDIA), Leigh Madden (Microsoft), John Garrett (Dell), Melika Carroll (Cohere), Dan Wright and Prag Mishra (Armada), Yadin Soffer (Traysar) Space, quantum, energy and aviation: the Privateer team, Matthew Kinsella (Infleqtion), Isaiah Taylor (Valar Atomics), Tom O'Leary (JetZero), Casey Swails (NASA) Bio and longevity: Dr. David Sinclair (Harvard Medical School), Jin Hyung Lee (LVIS), Debra Miller (CureDuchenne) Defense tech: Palmer Luckey (Anduril), Bala Selvam (Shield AI) Capital: Ryan Kriser and Omar Pimentel (Type One Ventures), Stephen Rodriguez (DCVC), Pedram Sheraf (Dream Ventures), Charles Beyrouthy (Forma Prime) Business, policy and education: Scott Boatwright (Chipotle), Jamie Jacobs (GigTalent), Yasith Weerasuriya (Edverum), Jim Gash (Pepperdine), Peter Belk (Nixon Peabody), MC Sungaila (CALG), Julie Smith (Clarion Strategies), Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation), Steve Hilton, Nico Roe, Nick Shirley Government: Anthony Pugliese Justin Bis Frank Salomone Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Sen. Kevin Cramer, Rep. Elise Stefanik, Rep. Ken Calvert, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Rep. Warren Davidson, Rep. Bryan Steil, Rep. Darrell Issa, Rep. Vince Fong, Rep. Lance Gooden, Assemblymember David Tangipa, Bill Guidera, Asst. Sec. Mike Dodd, John Reiten, Taylor Stockton (Dept. of Labor)
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Tiarne Hawkins reposted thisTiarne Hawkins reposted this“Are we ready to deploy AI?” is too broad a question. Ready for which use case? With what access, autonomy, and consequences if it fails? That is what makes the AI Assurance Council’s Enterprise LLM Deployment Readiness paper useful. It gives teams a framework they can apply to a specific deployment, with diagnostic questions across six pillars: • Governance: Who owns the outcome and the risk? • Technical: Can we observe and reconstruct what the system did? • Security and Adversarial: Have we tested the threats specific to LLMs? • Operational: Will people use the system effectively in the real workflow? • Compliance and Policy: Can we demonstrate that controls work? • Agentic AI: Where are the permission boundaries and human checkpoints? We formed the AI Assurance Council to bring together people who see deployment from different angles. Experience across financial services, healthcare, enterprise technology, AI platforms, governance, and research helped us challenge assumptions that might hold in one domain but fail in another. Thank you to the Council members named as authors of this paper: Bjorn Austraat, Malcolm deMayo, Dr. Seth Dobrin, Jigyasa Grover, Tiarne Hawkins, Natalie Isak, Roya Kandalan, Ivan Lee, Chris Luckenbill, Emily Luskind, John Napoli, Olivia Phillips, and Erin R. Read and download the paper: https://lnkd.in/gKxa6h2w What has been the hardest gap to close between pilot and production?
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Tiarne Hawkins shared thisDreamforce day 1 in San Francisco…. Excited to talk to as many people as possible about the advancements in Agentic AI and how we can create the visibility layer across “what agents say, do and act on… #dreamforce #AgenticAI #agentforce #samaltman
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Tiarne Hawkins shared thisHuge thank you to Outpost Ventures for yesterday’s deals on deck pitch competition! Incredible day with Investors, Founders and of course, Enterprise and Defense leaders! I had the chance to speak about building the visibility layer for Agentic AI ... Dave Harden Huge thank for the opportunity and thank you the judges Doug Jones, Nehemiah Green, Michael Savarese , Haley Bryant .
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Tiarne Hawkins shared thisWe’re taking the stage at Deals on Deck™! We’re excited to share that we have been selected to pitch at Outpost Ventures’ Deals on Deck™ on September 14th in Alexandria, VA. We’ll be joining a select group of emerging technology companies and sharing what we’re building with leaders across venture capital, defense, government, and industry. Looking forward to taking the stage, making new connections, and being part of an incredible day of innovation. Come see us pitch. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gdY-sZ-7 #DealsOnDeck #DefenseTech #DualUse #Innovation #VentureCapital
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Tiarne Hawkins shared thisWe are racing to build AI that can replace more human capability. But are we racing just as hard to build AI we can actually trust? Join me and Richard Mallah, Executive Director of the Center for AI Risk Management & Alignment, for: 🚨 The “Race to Replace” vs. Trustworthy Tools Richard has worked in AI for 25 years and spent the past 15 focused on the risks posed by advanced systems. We’ll explore controllability, catastrophic risk, offense versus defense—and whether some AI harms must be prevented before they become impossible to manage. The question isn’t simply how powerful AI becomes. It’s whether humanity remains in control of what we build. #YouAndAI #AISafety #TrustedAI #AIAlignment #ResponsibleAI
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Tiarne Hawkins shared thisSalesforce’s Agentforce 360 is now IL5-authorized and embedded within Missionforce National Security allowing Department of War organizations to deploy AI agents across sensitive, unclassified missions. The U.S. Army Human Resources Command will become the first DoW organization to deploy Agentforce in this environment, providing 24/7 support for 9.2 million Soldiers, Veterans, civilian employees, and military families. This conversation will explore what happens when AI moves beyond answering questions and begins taking action inside national security environments—and what leaders must get right around data, permissions, accountability, human oversight, and trust. I am so excited to for this episode with Bill Pessin SVP, Missionforce National Security at Salesforce .
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Tiarne Hawkins reacted on thisTiarne Hawkins reacted on thisNext Monday, October 5th, I’ll be heading to SF and on co-hosting duty with AI Circle and EPAM Systems as we kick off CoLM + TECH WEEK by a16z. Drinks, sushi, a great group of humans, a conversation you’ll actually take something away from, and (of course) a very cool space to spend your Monday night in before conference craziness. Models are getting very capable. Then we ask them to operate across actual tools, workflows, environments, memory, long-horizon tasks and real-world constraints…and things get a little more interesting. Joining us: Mark Hoffmann | Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Meta Aman Mehta| Senior Researcher, Snowflake AI Research Alena Sorokina | Senior Applied Scientist, Microsoft Leading the conversation from epam is Shahed Serajuddin We’ll get into training signal, agent evals, memory, environments, enterprise workflows, what breaks outside the benchmark, and what teams are still having to build themselves. Then cocktails. Obviously. RSVP Required: https://luma.com/cg60rrqm
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Tiarne Hawkins liked thisTiarne Hawkins liked thisBig news: Salesforce just acquired Listen Labs. I couldn’t be happier for two people I’ve known for a long time… Diana Lim and Madeline Mandell. Diana and Maddie were early Flint AI users, back when we were still figuring out what Flint would become. Somewhere along the way, they went from giving us feedback on our product to helping build one of the most exciting AI companies of the past few years. And now Salesforce. I love startups. Couldn’t be happier for you two. Huge congrats to Diana, Maddie, Alfred, Florian and the whole team! - This is us ↓ :)
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Tiarne Hawkins liked thisTiarne Hawkins liked thisSeptember is Recovery Month. Having been actively involved in recovery myself for the last couple of decades, it's always a time to reflect and be grateful. Our Caldwell team, including Charles Dresser and Ariel S. , worked on a pro bono project for the Power Forward 25 organization, helping them secure a patent in just six months. Their technology helps people in a desperate spot in their lives get to their next reliable housing. Proud of our team, and proud of the Power Forward organization. And a reminder: if you're struggling with drugs and alcohol, you're not alone. If you need someone to chat with, feel free to reach out to me. Verso l'alto
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Tiarne Hawkins liked thisTiarne Hawkins liked this
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Tiarne Hawkins liked thisTiarne Hawkins liked thisI've posted a novel proposal for how humanity should deal with governing AI. It's simple, powerful, and can be stated in one sentence.
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Tiarne Hawkins liked thisTiarne Hawkins liked thisWe spend *a lot* of time talking about what AI could do. I’m much more interested in learning what people are actually trying. What are you experimenting with? What worked? What didn’t? What surprised you? Which is why I love the idea behind AI-Powered Women DC’s AI Show & Tell on Oct. 9th. And they’re looking for presenters. You don’t need to be launching an AI company or unveiling something groundbreaking. If you’ve been experimenting with AI and have something interesting, useful or unexpected to share, raise your hand. Literally. Raise your hand. Because some of you are building things you haven’t talked about publicly yet. I know this because you call me. So, consider this your nudge. 😉 Kudos to Sara Kleiman and the AI-Powered Women Washington, D.C. team for creating a space where we can share what we’re trying, what we’re learning + learn from one another. 🩷 And a very big thank you to Jenn Sharp | SEI for hosting!
Experience
Licenses & Certifications
Projects
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Make a Wish foundation - Generative AI
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🔹Objective:
To explore and define how Artificial Intelligence can enhance the operations and impact of Make-A-Wish, focusing on innovation, efficiency, and personalized experiences.
🔸Design Sprint Workshops:
* Purpose: To rapidly ideate, prototype, and test AI-based solutions.
* Participants: Tech partners, AI experts, Make-A-Wish staff, volunteers, and selected families.
* Process: Following a structured design sprint model over 5 days - Understand, Diverge…🔹Objective:
To explore and define how Artificial Intelligence can enhance the operations and impact of Make-A-Wish, focusing on innovation, efficiency, and personalized experiences.
🔸Design Sprint Workshops:
* Purpose: To rapidly ideate, prototype, and test AI-based solutions.
* Participants: Tech partners, AI experts, Make-A-Wish staff, volunteers, and selected families.
* Process: Following a structured design sprint model over 5 days - Understand, Diverge, Decide, Prototype, and Test.
🔸Technology Partnership Engagement:
* Scouting and Engagement: Identify and collaborate with technology firms specializing in AI.
* Collaboration Framework: Establishing roles, expectations, and contribution models.
* Integration: Seamlessly integrating AI technologies with existing Make-A-Wish systems. -
Talk5 Conversational AI
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🔹 Project Description:
As a key contributor in the Talk5 AI roadmap project, I played an instrumental role in shaping the future of Talk5's Conversational AI technology. This involved a collaborative effort to define a strategic and innovative roadmap tailored to evolving market demands and technological advancements.
🔸 My Contributions:
* Design Sprint Workshop Facilitation: Led a series of design sprint workshops to rapidly prototype and test ideas. This enabled the team to quickly…🔹 Project Description:
As a key contributor in the Talk5 AI roadmap project, I played an instrumental role in shaping the future of Talk5's Conversational AI technology. This involved a collaborative effort to define a strategic and innovative roadmap tailored to evolving market demands and technological advancements.
🔸 My Contributions:
* Design Sprint Workshop Facilitation: Led a series of design sprint workshops to rapidly prototype and test ideas. This enabled the team to quickly visualize potential AI features and innovations, ensuring that our roadmap was both ambitious and feasible.
* AI Model Exploration: Spearheaded the exploration of various AI models, delving into cutting-edge technologies and methodologies. This research was critical in identifying the most promising AI solutions to enhance the Talk5 product's capabilities.
* Collaborative Teamwork: Worked closely with product managers, developers, and AI specialists, fostering a collaborative environment that encouraged innovative thinking and problem-solving.
* Stakeholder Engagement: Engaged with stakeholders to gather feedback and insights, ensuring that our roadmap was aligned with customer needs and market trends.
🔸 Skills Utilized:
* AI and Machine Learning Knowledge
* Strategic Planning and Analysis
* Collaborative Team Leadership
* Creative Problem-Solving
* Effective Communication and Stakeholder Management -
YOU & AI Podcast
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