Adi Ben-Ari, Founder and CEO of Applied Blockchain, joins Lawrence Baker, Policy Adviser at The Investment Association, on IA Talks AI.
Digital assets and AI are usually argued about separately, and Adi is usually asked for a view on one or the other. The IA's members care about both, and about what happens where they meet, which is what makes this conversation an unusual one: blockchain as the connected, programmable rails, and AI as an increasingly capable layer for deciding and acting on top of them.
Adi and Lawrence cover:
- Why tokenisation only delivers its full value once the infrastructure around it is connected, rather than asset by asset
- How AI is already changing how software gets built, and how teams work internally
- The difference between using an LLM directly and using one to build deterministic tools you can rely on
- Whether AI agents could eventually recommend and execute actions across digital financial markets
- What regulated institutions need before they can adopt public blockchain infrastructure safely
The conversation stays deliberately close to what firms are dealing with now. Two points worth the price of admission: lowering the cost of building software does not lower the cost of maintaining it, and the more autonomy you hand to a system, the more architecture, governance and control matter, not less.
Listen on The Investment Association's IA Talks AI hub, where the rest of the series lives, or watch the full episode on YouTube.
