Governing Generative AI for Safe AI-Assisted Software Development
Generative AI is rapidly moving from experimentation into real-world software development, supporting application code generation, automated test scripting, AI-driven code review, and disaster recovery orchestration. In financial technology, these applied AI capabilities can accelerate delivery, but they also introduce governance risks that require practical controls before deployment at scale.
This session examines two critical risks in AI-assisted development pipelines. Correlated errors can occur when AI systems generate both application code and test scripts using the same flawed assumptions, allowing defects to bypass validation. AI hallucination can produce plausible but incorrect outputs against strict financial rules, leading to calculation errors, data handling failures, or flawed system integrations.
Drawing on a practical framework aligned with NIST AI RMF 1.0, Basel Committee Operational Resilience Principles, and EBA ICT Risk Management Guidelines, the session presents a human-in-the-loop governance model requiring direct human scrutiny before AI-generated code reaches production. It also explains why risk should be classified by functional impact rather than whether code originated from a human or an AI system.
As generative AI evolves from development assistant to autonomous operator, the session explores emerging challenges involving AI-generated patches, incident diagnosis, infrastructure orchestration, accountability, contextual judgment, and cross-border data controls. Attendees will gain a structured approach for applying generative AI to software delivery while balancing automation with the governance requirements of regulated environments.
About the speaker
Ashima Chakravarty
Global Head of Change Management at BlackRock
Ashima Chakravarty is an Engineering Director and Change Management Leader with over 15 years of experience in enterprise transformation, change governance, and large-scale platform operations within global financial services organizations. Based in Atlanta, GA, she has built a distinguished career leading cross-regional engineering, risk, and operations teams supporting highly regulated investment technology platforms used by institutional and retail market participants across multiple jurisdictions. Currently serving as Global Head of Change Management at BlackRock, a role she has held since 2014, Ashima leads firm-wide enterprise change governance for infrastructure, software, and configuration changes across global technology environments. She is accountable for the change-risk posture of one of the world’s largest asset-management platforms, ensuring operational resilience, production readiness, and regulatory compliance at scale. Under her leadership, BlackRock has sustained a 98%+ successful change-execution rate across 22,000 annual infrastructure changes. Ashima’s project portfolio reflects the breadth and impact of her work. She led change governance for the multi-year migration of the Aladdin platform to Microsoft Azure, serving approximately 130,000 users and over 200 institutional clients across 50+ countries, achieving a zero-disruption infrastructure transition. She also spearheaded operational governance for the BlackRock–Jio joint venture in India, the largest new Asset Management Company launch in the country’s recent history, resulting in over $2 billion in assets raised within three days and zero disruption on launch day. Most recently, she has served as principal architect of a firm-wide initiative designed to eliminate technology incidents caused by changes across one of the world’s largest financial-technology platforms Beyond her project leadership, Ashima is recognized as a builder of scalable systems and high-performing teams. She conceived and built BlackRock’s first Power BI–based Major Market Events and Enterprise-Wide Change Planner, a framework now adopted globally by over 10,000 users. She has been recognized through BlackRock’s Technology Leadership Accelerator (TLX) program and the PROPEL advancement program, which honors the top 1% of leaders through senior executive sponsorship. She also led Atlanta’s flagship Technology Engineering Summit, bringing together over 250 attendees and eight global technology partners. Before BlackRock, Ashima worked at Publicis Sapient (formerly Sapient Consulting) as a Software Developer and Trading Platform Support Engineer, where she developed strong engineering fundamentals and expertise in operational resilience within high-reliability trading environments. She holds a Master of Computer Applications from the National Institute of Technology, Raipur, India, and a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Computer Science from the Institute for Excellence in Higher Education, India.