rewrite this title Exclusive Interview with Janet Adams, COO of SingularityNET and Board Director of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Allianc

From overseeing risk and regulation across 60 countries at HSBC to helping architect a decentralized AI future at SingularityNET, Janet Adams has had a front-row seat to how technology meets accountability. As COO of SingularityNET and a Board Director of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, she’s focused on making sure the wealth created by AI benefits everyone—not just a few.

In this conversation, we explore why the ASI Alliance believes Web3 is the right home for AGI; how the addition of CUDOS strengthens the network with massive decentralized compute; and what ASI:Cloud unlocks for builders today, permissionless GPU access, open-source models, wallet login, and transparent pay-per-token pricing. Janet also previews the roadmap from LLM inference to speech, multimodal and video, plus encrypted knowledge graphs and enterprise features; and she lifts the lid on two coming products, ASI:Chain (an AI-native blockDAG) and ASI:Create (tools to build and own AI agents). We finish on ethics, governance, real-world adoption—and why verifiable, open systems can shift AI from something you consume to an ecosystem you co-create.

Introduction

Hello Janet, thank you for speaking to us at DeFi Planet. You’ve had such a unique journey; from overseeing regulation across 60 countries at HSBC to now shaping the future of decentralized AI. You’ve moved from the familiarity of traditional finance to the less-predictable, fast-moving world of blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence.  What motivated that transition?

Janet Adams: My background is in banking risk, regulation, and technology. I spent over two decades working across organisations like HSBC, RBS, and TSB. What drives me now is that we’re at the foothills of the AI revolution, and the most important imperative is to make sure technology-generated wealth benefits everyone. Moving into decentralised AI with SingularityNET felt like a natural step, I want to help build systems where power and access are distributed, not concentrated.

DeFi Planet: How has your banking background influenced the way you approach AI innovation including use of process automation, customer service chatbots, and so on?

Janet Adams: My time in banking taught me the value of structure, accountability, and transparency. Things that are just as important in AI. When you’ve spent years managing risk and regulation, you learn that innovation only works when people can trust the systems behind it.

That’s shaped how I approach AI development today. Whether it’s process automation or conversational AI, the goal isn’t just efficiency but making sure the technology is explainable, fair, and benefits everyone, not just a few.

DeFi Planet: Before we dive into product news, can you share what personally excites you most about SingularityNET, the ASI Alliance’s vision, and the role of decentralized AI in today’s world?

Janet Adams: It will be our greatest achievement as a species to invent AGI in a way that benefits all of humanity, decentralized and accessible. Our mission at SingularityNET and within the ASI Alliance is to drive towards a positive, beneficial, benevolent Singularity for the benefit of all humankind. I’ve followed AI’s progress for decades, and being able to build open, decentralized AI that can uplift everyone (not just the few) is what truly inspires me every day.

Vision & Future of the ASI Alliance

DeFi Planet: The ASI Alliance was initially formed by SingularityNET, and Fetch.ai. What motivated the creation of the alliance? 

Janet Adams: We joined forces to form the ASI Alliance because we all share one vision – for Web3 decentralized AI to be the birthplace of AGI. Our mission is to tackle big tech dominance and bring these tools and make them available and deploy them in an ethical way for the benefit of humanity.

 

DeFi Planet: The ASI Alliance has since welcomed CUDOS to the fold. What does this collaboration add to the collective?

Janet Adams: CUDOS brings a critical new strength to the alliance: massive decentralized compute power. “By adding CUDOS’ decentralised compute team to the alliance, we have scale and we can really tackle Big Tech”. CUDOS is one of the largest providers of high-end AI compute in the decentralized world. Their addition means we can run more AI workloads, more affordably and efficiently, on our own permissionless cloud.

DeFi Planet: Could you walk us through the phased roadmap for ASI:Cloud; from inference and compute, to speech, multimodal, and eventually video and knowledge graphs? What excites you most about these milestones?

Janet Adams: Absolutely. ASI:Cloud’s roadmap comes in phases, each unlocking new AI capabilities. Phase 1 is our launch phase where GPU compute and Large Language Model inference, giving developers instant access to top open-source LLMs and on-demand GPUs. Phase 2 will introduce speech processing services, larger 100B+ parameter models, and support for multimodal inputs (so the AI can handle text and other data like audio/images.) Phase 3 is where it gets really exciting – we bring in image processing and video generation, plus encrypted knowledge graphs for AI reasoning. Finally, Phase 4 is all about enterprise features – the polish and integrations businesses need.

DeFi Planet: Five years from now, how do you envision decentralized AI changing business, society, and even how individuals interact with technology?

Janet Adams: I believe in five years decentralized AI will transform AI from a product you consume into an ecosystem you co-create. In five years, decentralized AI will look more like an open marketplace: verifiable compute, predictable costs, and AI agents businesses can actually own. It shifts AI from a product you consume to an ecosystem you co-create.

ASI Cloud Launch

DeFi Planet: ASI:Cloud is billed as AI infrastructure redefined; permissionless, affordable, and transparent. From a builder’s perspective, what pain points does ASI:Cloud solve that centralized cloud providers haven’t been able to address?

Janet Adams: ASI Cloud is a permissionless AI cloud, not another walled garden. It gives developers instant, wallet-based access to enterprise-grade GPUs and open-source models at transparent, pay-per-token prices. No lock-ins, no fiat-only or KYC barriers, just scalable AI infrastructure designed for Web3 builders and enterprises alike.

We remove the friction that centralized clouds impose. Developers don’t have to sign long contracts or negotiate usage terms just to run an AI model, they can jump in with a crypto wallet and start computing. There’s no gatekeeping (like restrictive account approvals or high upfront costs) and no opaque pricing surprises. Everything is on a simple pay-as-you-go token model, with full transparency. 

For builders, that means freedom: freedom to experiment, to scale up or down at will, and to use cutting-edge open-source AI models without being trapped in any one company’s ecosystem.

DeFi Planet: The “crypto-first” approach – pay-per-token, wallet login, no KYC -is bold. How do you see this model driving adoption among developers and enterprises, especially those accustomed to traditional, fiat-based platforms?

Janet Adams: Our crypto-first approach removes barriers traditional platforms can’t. Developers can start instantly, with no signups or compliance hurdles; just connect a wallet and go. That speed and openness will drive adoption from hackathon teams to indie AI builders and global researchers.

For enterprises, it’s a glimpse of a new model: instant, global access with transparent, verifiable costs tied to token usage. Fiat support is coming, but starting crypto-first proves that tokenized, usage-based AI can be both reliable and enterprise-grade.

Innovators will lead the way, and as their success grows, larger organizations will follow. With bridges like fiat gateways on the roadmap, no one will be left out. Our stance is clear: AI infrastructure can be open, user-centric, and free from the constraints of traditional cloud systems.

DeFi Planet: ASI:Cloud has a clear roadmap with phases from LLM inference to multimodal AI and enterprise services. Which milestone do you believe will have the most transformative impact on adoption, and why?

Janet Adams: Each milestone is important, but if I have to pick the most transformative for adoption, I’d say the arrival of true multimodal AI services on ASI:Cloud will be a turning point. By that stage, not only will our platform handle text (LLMs), but also speech and vision, and even video generation, all backed by knowledge graphs for context. That is huge. It means a decentralized AI cloud can offer the full spectrum of AI capabilities that people currently look to multiple specialized (and centralized) services for. When we reach the point that you can run an AI on ASI:Cloud that, for example, listens to a call, understands the conversation, references a knowledge graph for facts, and generates a video or image output all in one seamless workflow, no one will doubt that decentralized AI can match what Big Tech’s clouds can do. 

Exclusive Product Insights

DeFi Planet: Beyond ASI:Cloud, we understand there are two new products on the horizon: ASI Chain and ASI Create. Without giving away too much, what can you tell us about the problems these products aim to solve, and how they fit into the broader ASI Alliance ecosystem?

Janet Adams: ASI Chain is an AI-native blockDAG built from the ground up to support large-scale intelligent systems. Its blockDAG core and MeTTaCycle execution layer enable true parallelism, encrypted computation proofs, and on-chain reasoning, allowing neural networks, probabilistic logic, and symbolic AI to run directly within the protocol.

Meanwhile, ASI:Create is addressing the creator side of the equation. It provides a suite of tools for developers (or even non-developers) to build, customize, and deploy AI agents easily. These agents can have encrypted knowledge graphs (so they maintain private or proprietary knowledge securely), handle multimodal inputs/outputs, and are fully owned by the creator.

DeFi Planet: How do these products complement each other? Should we think of ASI Cloud, Chain, and Create as standalone offerings, or as building blocks of an integrated decentralized AI stack?

Janet Adams: They’re absolutely meant to work together as an integrated stack. Together with ASI Cloud, they form a stack that makes decentralized AI usable, trustworthy, and unstoppable. You can use any one of them on its own… for example, someone might use just ASI:Cloud as a more affordable alternative to a centralized GPU cloud, or a developer might use ASI:Chain in their own project to verify AI outputs. But the real power is when you use them in combination.

Adoption & Real-World Impact

DeFi Planet: You’ve emphasized making AI open and accessible to all. What are the biggest adoption challenges you foresee, whether technical, regulatory, or cultural, and how does ASI Alliance plan to overcome them?

Janet Adams: One major challenge is bridging the understanding gap. Culturally and within industries, many people still see AI (and especially decentralized AI) as complex or risky. I’ve seen this first-hand: The challenge with bringing artificial intelligence into [for example] the financial services industry is education. AI is a pretty complex topic; it’s not something that can be really skimmed or understood to a level that makes an accountable executive comfortable to implement new technologies. So, education and awareness are huge. We plan to overcome that by demonstrating clear use-cases and making the on-boarding as simple as possible.

On the regulatory side, there’s a perception that decentralization might clash with compliance, but in my experience it’s quite the opposite. “Having worked across 60 jurisdictions, I see decentralization as a compliance advantage. Distributed infrastructure allows us to embed transparency, auditability, and data sovereignty into the design…we’re building AI clouds that regulators can actually trust.

Culturally, there can be skepticism: “Is this Web3 stuff really necessary?” or “Will it scale?”. That’s why our strategy is to deliver tangible products quickly (like ASI:Cloud launch) to show real value. As people use these tools and see “Oh, I can deploy an AI service globally in seconds and it’s cheaper and I’m not locked in”, attitudes shift.

DeFi Planet: For businesses evaluating decentralized AI today, what’s the most compelling real-world use case you would highlight that demonstrates the immediate benefits of ASI’s approach?

Janet Adams: I like to give concrete examples. One compelling use case is spin-up AI infrastructure on demand: “A startup can spin up GPUs by the hour, pay in stablecoins, and avoid burning months negotiating hyperscaler contracts. An enterprise can benchmark multiple open-source LLMs with full visibility into cost and performance. Decentralized AI lowers friction where centralized clouds create bottlenecks.

Ethical AI & Governance

DeFi Planet: You’re a passionate advocate for ethical AI. As we stand on the cusp of an AI revolution, what are the risks posed to society from unethical use of AI? 

Janet Adams: The risks are serious and wide-ranging. The dystopian future many fear could happen if AI is monopolized or misused by powerful actors. If Big Tech controls AGI, it could be used for profit rather than for society’s benefit, deepening inequality.

If AI is developed secretly by militaries, it could become a weapon or spark an AI arms race. A single authoritarian government controlling advanced AI could use it for mass surveillance and control, eroding privacy and freedom.

Even now, unethical AI use can amplify bias, discrimination, and misinformation. We already see biased algorithms and deepfakes destabilizing societies.

That’s why ethics must be built in.

DeFi Planet: How is the ASI Alliance embedding ethics, transparency, and accountability into its infrastructure, especially as AI becomes more powerful and autonomous?

Janet Adams: Ethics must be built into the architecture, not just written in a policy. Transparency is key. Decentralized AI must be governed by transparency in pricing, verifiability of compute, and open access to models. The mechanisms are cryptographic guarantees, not corporate promises.

With ASI:Cloud, pricing and usage metrics are fully transparent. ASI:Chain ensures every compute task is verifiable on-chain, creating an immutable audit trail. Smart contracts and decentralized governance prevent any single party from secretly changing system behavior.

Model accountability is another priority. AI decisions should be explainable through logged reasoning or data references, using encrypted knowledge graphs and audit logs.

Our open governance model involves the community in decisions, from upgrades to ethical reviews. The ASI token serves as a governance tool.

We’re also planning “ethics checkpoints” before deploying advanced AI, requiring review and sign-off. In short, our infrastructure is designed to be open, verifiable, and governed by many. If something goes wrong, it’s visible and can be fixed collectively.

 

DeFi Planet: Centralized AI has raised serious concerns around data monopolies and bias. How can decentralization practically enforce fairness and trust; not just in theory, but in everyday use?

Janet Adams: Decentralization creates fairness by widening participation and removing gatekeepers. A diverse global community building and governing AI helps eliminate bias that comes from narrow perspectives. We have the most diverse leadership team in technology, and that ensures AGI benefits everyone, not just one group.

It also prevents data monopolies. Contributors keep control of their data while still collaborating on shared models, ensuring no single organization owns the results.

Trust comes from verifiability. Every AI decision on ASI infrastructure can be checked through cryptographic proofs and transparent logs. Users can see where a model came from, how it was trained, and how it reached its conclusion.

Instead of asking people to trust a company, we let them trust the math and the code.

DeFi Planet: Looking ahead, do you see decentralized AI needing global regulatory frameworks, or do you believe the technology itself can self-govern through openness and transparency?

Janet Adams: I believe open technology can solve many of the problems regulation aims to address. Transparency, auditability, and data sovereignty can all be enforced by code and consensus.

That said, global principles such as banning autonomous weapons or mass surveillance are important to align values. But heavy-handed rules aren’t needed if systems already self-govern.

Just like Bitcoin enforces trust through code, decentralized AI can do the same for ethics. Smart contracts and community voting can keep models fair and safe. Regulators and projects can work together on shared goals, but openness itself is the best safeguard against abuse.

Closing

DeFi Planet: Finally, for builders, researchers, or enterprises who are excited by ASI Alliance’s vision; what’s the best way for them to start experimenting with ASI:Cloud and get involved in this new decentralized AI ecosystem?

Janet Adams: ASI:Cloud is live and open to everyone. Just log in with a Web3 wallet, no signup or KYC required, and start experimenting. New users get free inference credits to test models or launch GPU instances right away.

Developers can explore open-source models like the ASI-1 mini LLM, integrate them via API, and find support in our Developer Hub. Our Discord community is active and collaborative, and we run grants and hackathons for anyone building on the network.

Enterprises can start small, run a pilot, and see the transparency and performance firsthand. Whether you’re a solo researcher or a Fortune 500 team, you can begin today. This ecosystem is open, growing fast, and ready for builders who believe AI should serve everyone.

Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be considered trading or investment advice. Nothing herein should be construed as financial, legal, or tax advice. Trading or investing in cryptocurrencies carries a considerable risk of financial loss. Always conduct due diligence. 

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