Salesforce's top AI ethics leader says she's 'optimistic' on the path to U.S. regulation

BARCELONA — A top executive at Salesforce says she is "optimistic" that U.S. Congress will make new laws to regulate artificial intelligence soon.

Speaking with CNBC at the Mobile World Congress tech trade show in Barcelona, Spain, Paula Goldman, Salesforce's chief ethical and humane use officer, said she's seeing momentum toward concrete AI laws in the United States and that federal legislation is not far off.

She noted that the need to consider guardrails has become a "bipartisan" issue for U.S. lawmakers and highlighted efforts among individual states to devise their own AI laws.

"It's very important to ensure U.S. lawmakers can agree on AI laws and work to pass them soon," Goldman told CNBC. "It's great, for example, to see the EU AI Act. It's great to see everything going on in the U.K."

"We've been actively involved in that as well. And you want to make sure ... these international frameworks are relatively interoperable, as well," she added.

"In the United States context, what will happen is, if we don't have federal legislation, you'll start to see state by state legislation, and we're definitely starting to see that. And that's also very suboptimal," Goldman said.

But, she added, "I remain optimistic, because I think if you saw a number of the hearings that happened in the Senate, they were largely bipartisan."

"And I will also say, I think there are a number of sub issues that I think are largely bipartisan, that certainly I'm optimistic about it. And I think it's very important that we have a set of guardrails around the technology," Goldman added.

Goldman sits on the U.S. National AI Advisory Committee, which advises the Biden administration on topics related to AI. She is Salesforce's top leader focusing on the