Elisabeth Austad Asser works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, ethics, and everyday decision-making.
She holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Ethics from the University of Agder and has spent more than two decades inside major Norwegian organisations working on digitalisation, marketing, sustainability, and change management.
Asser’s research focuses on how algorithmic systems sort people and how those systems can either support or undermine core societal values such as fairness, inclusion, and trust. In her doctoral work, conducted in parallel with her role overseeing sustainability at Sparebanken Sør, she examined how AI is used in banking and developed 13 concrete recommendations for responsible, value-aligned deployment. Her work shows how data-driven efficiency, left unchecked, can quietly reinforce inequality and how organisations can choose differently.
Elisabeth Asser is known for making complex technological questions understandable without oversimplifying them. In her TEDxArendal talk and her book Teknologiens Makt, she explores how AI doesn’t just change what we do, but how we see ourselves: our sense of agency, our choices, and our freedom. She asks a deceptively simple question that runs through all her work: when algorithms decide what we see, get offered, or are excluded from — who is really in control?
What sets Asser apart is her insistence that AI ethics is not an abstract debate or a compliance exercise. It is a leadership, cultural and human issue. Drawing on her experience as a researcher, executive, and parent, she brings a grounded perspective to discussions often dominated by technical or ideological extremes.
Elisabeth Asser invites organisations to slow down just enough to ask better questions. Not whether AI can be used, but how. Not what is efficient, but fair. And not what technology makes possible, but what kind of future it quietly locks in.
