OPEN Islamabad has launched the AI Special Interest Group, a dedicated community space for exploring artificial intelligence’s impact on business, policy, and innovation, with the inaugural session scheduled for Thursday, July 16, 2026, from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM at COWORK24 in Gulberg Greens, Islamabad. The first session, titled AI Governance and Cybersecurity: Governing and Securing AI in the Age of Agents, features Dr. Rafae Bhatti, Chief Information Security Officer at Thunes Financial Services, Founder of ClaritasGRC.ai, and a security executive and privacy attorney, as the lead speaker. Seats are limited and registration is open at lnkd.in/dty3VVMK.
The launch of the AI Special Interest Group reflects OPEN Islamabad’s recognition that artificial intelligence has moved from a general interest topic into a specific and consequential domain of professional practice that warrants its own dedicated community infrastructure, separate from the broader entrepreneurship and networking programming that characterises the organisation’s main events. As artificial intelligence tools and systems become more deeply embedded in business operations, regulatory frameworks, and policy conversations, the professionals navigating these developments within their organisations need structured occasions to engage with peers, experts, and practitioners who are working through the same challenges from different vantage points, and the AI Special Interest Group provides exactly this kind of focused, ongoing community engagement.
The decision to open the AI Special Interest Group with a session on governance and cybersecurity rather than a more general introduction to artificial intelligence reflects a deliberate and well-reasoned prioritisation of the dimensions of AI adoption that carry the most immediate and consequential risks for organisations deploying these systems. As AI moves from simple, deterministic tools into autonomous agents capable of reasoning, accessing data, and taking actions independently, the governance and security questions that arise are fundamentally different from those that applied to earlier generations of enterprise software. Agentic AI systems can act on behalf of an organisation without human review of each decision, can access sensitive data at a scale and speed that traditional access controls were not designed to manage, and can produce outputs whose security and compliance implications require entirely new frameworks to evaluate and manage.
Dr. Rafae Bhatti’s combination of roles as a Chief Information Security Officer, startup founder in the governance, risk, and compliance space, and privacy attorney gives him a distinctively comprehensive perspective on these challenges, spanning the operational security leadership perspective of someone responsible for protecting a major financial technology company’s systems, the entrepreneurial perspective of someone building technology to address these challenges at scale, and the legal and regulatory perspective of someone trained in privacy law and its intersection with emerging technology governance. The session is designed for executives, Chief Information Security Officers, risk and compliance leaders, and technology leaders who are navigating artificial intelligence adoption within their organisations and need practical, expert guidance on how to govern and secure AI systems as they become more autonomous and more consequential. The event is organised in partnership with AI SIG, COWORK24, and Inspire Mill, and professionals in Islamabad’s business and technology community who are working through AI governance challenges are encouraged to register at lnkd.in/dty3VVMK before the limited seats are filled.
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