Zahra Timsah, Co-Founder and CEO of I-GENTIC AI – Interview Series

Zahra Timsah, Co-Founder and CEO of I-GENTIC AI, is a distinguished leader at the intersection of technology and business, recognized for her expertise in AI-driven innovation and digital transformation. With a career spanning executive roles at MassMutual and IQVIA, she has led large-scale initiatives in artificial intelligence, governance, and data transformation, particularly within healthcare and financial services. In addition to her leadership at I-GENTIC AI, Dr. Timsah contributes to global AI governance and policy through the World Economic Forum and serves as an executive member of Chief, highlighting her influence in shaping the responsible adoption of AI across industries.

i-GENTIC AI is an enterprise governance platform that delivers real-time policy enforcement across AI, data, privacy, and cybersecurity domains using intelligent agents. Their flagship system, GENIE™, translates complex rules into explainable, auditable actions—ensuring every decision is transparent and compliant. Designed for high-stakes sectors like healthcare, finance, insurance, and the public sector, i-GENTIC enables scalable, automated governance with human oversight at critical points.

You’ve held leadership roles at MassMutual, IQVIA, and the World Economic Forum—how did that experience shape your decision to found i-GENTIC and ultimately create GENIE™?

Each role gave me a different vantage point on the same challenge: how do we innovate responsibly in highly regulated environments?

At MassMutual, I saw how financial institutions are often torn between moving fast with data-driven products and staying within the tight guardrails of compliance. At IQVIA, I saw the complexity of global healthcare and life sciences, where every country has its own rules and patients’ lives depend on trustworthy data governance. At the World Economic Forum, I had a seat at the table with regulators, policymakers, and CEOs, and I realized that no matter the geography or industry, the same fear kept surfacing: “Can we trust this technology?”

Those experiences taught me two things. First, compliance is not a bottleneck, it is the foundation of trust. Second, without rethinking how compliance is managed, innovation will always lag behind regulation. i-GENTIC was born from the conviction that we could flip that script. Our latest launch, GENIE™, exists to turn compliance from a brake into a gas pedal that drives innovation – so enterprises can move faster and safer.

What was the biggest early challenge in turning the idea of autonomous compliance into a real product?

The hardest challenge wasn’t actually the technology. It was convincing companies that the tech was inevitable. When I first shared the idea that regulations could be translated into machine logic and enforced in real time, most people dismissed it. Some chuckled. I was told, “That’s science fiction, maybe in 50 years.”

They couldn’t see what I saw: that AI was going to collide with compliance sooner than anyone expected. Boards and regulators weren’t just going to ask, ‘What can AI do?’ They were going to ask, ‘Can we trust it to follow the rules?’

I started as a biologist with a lab bench, pipettes, and Excel spreadsheets. I saw patterns hidden in data long before AI was mainstream. Leaving the security of academia was risky, but I knew the world was heading toward a moment where trust in AI would be non-negotiable.

That conviction carried me through years of skepticism until regulators began asking for the very technology people had laughed at: a product that can encode and enforce rules in real time.

So the early challenge was not proving the technology. It was proving the vision. Once people started to believe, building the product became inevitable.

How does GENIE™ actually read and translate regulatory documents into enforceable logic without human coding?

GENIE™ uses a layered approach. First, it ingests regulatory documents such as laws, policies, and SOPs, then breaks them down into discrete obligations, exceptions, and conditional statements.

Instead of treating regulations as blocks of legal text, GENIE™ decomposes them into what we call micro-policies. These are atomic rules that are small enough to be machine-readable but rich enough to capture intent.

Next, GENIE™ applies natural language processing and semantic parsing to map those micro-policies into enforceable logic. It does not require human developers to write code. Instead, the platform compiles rules into structured logic that can be executed directly within enterprise systems. Think of it as a compiler for compliance. It takes the language of regulation and turns it into executable instructions that sit inside workflows.

Regulations are often vague or subject to interpretation—how does GENIE™ handle ambiguity and ensure its actions are correct?

Ambiguity is the reality of regulation, and no amount of AI can erase that truth. What GENIE™ does is make ambiguity visible, measurable, and actionable. When GENIE™ encounters vague language such as “reasonable safeguards” or “appropriate access,” it assigns a confidence score, contextualizes the interpretation against precedent and industry norms, and flags whether the decision should be automated or escalated. Enterprises can configure these thresholds.

Here’s a simple example: say a fintech company wants to send an email saying an investment offers “guaranteed growth.” GENIE™ flags that wording as risky and sends it to a compliance officer instead of approving it.

The same fintech uses multi-factor authentication for logins. GENIE™ sees this as meeting “reasonable safeguards” with high confidence, so it approves it without human review.

If GENIE™ is below the threshold, it routes to a human compliance officer. If above, it acts autonomously. This way, GENIE™ does not remove human judgment. It augments it. It ensures that gray areas are managed consistently, transparently, and with full traceability. Over time, as GENIE™ ingests regulatory updates and enterprise feedback, its handling of ambiguity improves, closing the gap between rules on paper and enforcement in practice.

How do you make sure enterprises can see and audit exactly why GENIE™ took a specific action?

Transparency is non-negotiable. Every action GENIE™ takes generates a why-trace: a structured log that shows the policy enforced, the data accessed, the decision path followed, and the outcome applied.

This audit trail is immutable and exportable. A compliance officer or regulator can walk through every step as if they were sitting inside the agent’s thought process. It is not just a black box that says “approved” or “denied.” It is a full map of ‘why.’

That means enterprises do not just trust GENIE™. They can verify it, defend it, and use it to strengthen their compliance posture in front of any regulator, board, or auditor.

What safeguards are in place to ensure sensitive enterprise data remains private and secure when using your platform?

GENIE™ is designed to operate inside the enterprise environment. Sensitive data never has to leave a customer’s infrastructure. Instead of centralizing data, GENIE™ deploys enforcement logic at the edge, where the data lives.

On top of that, we use multiple layers of protection: end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest; role-based access control to restrict who can configure, view, or override GENIE™ actions; immutable audit logs to track every interaction; data minimization principles so only the necessary data is ever touched.

GENIE™ isn’t just compliant with security and privacy standards. It is built with those standards as its operating DNA.

Which industries or customer types have shown the most interest so far, and why?

Healthcare and financial services have been the early adopters. Both industries live under constant regulatory pressure, both deal with highly sensitive data, and both are moving aggressively to adopt AI.

In healthcare, organizations are struggling to balance HIPAA, FDA requirements, and emerging AI guidelines while still innovating in precision medicine and digital health. In finance, institutions are facing the dual challenge of deploying AI for credit scoring, fraud detection, and trading while simultaneously proving to regulators that the models are explainable, fair, and trustworthy.

What unites both is the cost of non-compliance. It is measured not just in fines but in reputational damage and, in some cases, existential risk. That is why these industries aren’t just interested in GENIE™, they are hungry for it. A digital compliance officer at every step of innovation means less worry that each step might violate compliance standards.

How do you differentiate i-GENTIC from existing compliance and governance tools already on the market?

So most governance tools today are reactive. They run audits after the fact, generate dashboards, or provide static controls that cannot keep up with change. GENIE™, on the other hand, is proactive.

We sit inside enterprise workflows and enforce compliance dynamically, in real time. Instead of saying, “Here is what went wrong last quarter,” GENIE™ prevents violations before they happen. We also unify AI, data, privacy, and cybersecurity governance under one platform instead of treating them as silos.

This is not just an incremental improvement. It is a paradigm shift. We are moving from compliance as hindsight to compliance as foresight. And that’s what makes i-GENTIC unique.

If GENIE™ makes an automated change that regulators later challenge, how do you help customers manage that risk?

We recognize that regulation is not static. It evolves, and sometimes interpretations shift. That is why GENIE™ always keeps a full, explainable record of its actions.

If a regulator challenges a change, customers can present the precise logic GENIE™ used, the version of the regulation at the time, and the rationale for the decision. If the regulation has since changed, GENIE™ can instantly update its enforcement logic across the enterprise.

In practice, this means GENIE™ does not just act. It provides the evidence, traceability, and adaptability customers need to stand behind those actions confidently, even in the face of shifting regulatory expectations.

Looking five years ahead, how do you see agentic AI transforming compliance and governance across industries?

Five years from now, I foresee agentic AI to be as essential to enterprises as ERP systems are today. Every enterprise AI deployment will come with governance agents alongside it.

Compliance will no longer be a quarterly checklist. It will be continuous, contextual, and adaptive. Agentic AI will allow enterprises to operate in real time with regulators instead of always playing catch-up.

Most importantly, compliance will shift from being a burden to being a source of competitive advantage. Companies that can prove, in real time, that their systems are trustworthy will move faster, partner better, and win markets sooner. In that future, governance is not an obstacle. It is the enabler of innovation. That is the world i-GENTIC and GENIE™ are building toward.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit i-GENTIC.