AI & Machine Learning

Building a Custom AI Agent: A Practical Walkthrough for Policy Teams Webinar

Tuesday, September 22 @ 2:00pm ET

Overview

Please join us for the Building a Custom AI Agent: A Practical Walkthrough for Policy Teams webinar on TuesdaySeptember 22 from 2:00 – 3:00pm ET. This session is open to the public as a preview of our AI Practical Education series — FPF members receive full access to the entire series and additional benefits.

Agentic AI tools are increasingly marketed as a solution for the kind of recurring, labor-intensive research that privacy and policy teams do every week: monitoring a regulatory landscape, tracking sector developments, or producing an internal briefing. This webinar will offer a hands-on look at how to build and maintain one yourself.

In the webinar, FPF Senior Fellow, Andrew Gruen will walk through the design of a custom agentic workflow from end to end, using a custom example of a tool that ingests material from sources such as global Data Protection Authority feeds, NIST, the Federal Register, FTC announcements, arXiv, and selected trade press, then classifies and drafts entries on privacy-related AI incidents for human review. The example is illustrative, while the design choices, tradeoffs, and failure modes it surfaces are meant to be applicable to any recurring monitoring or drafting workflow. 

If you bring your own Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex subscription, we’ll reserve time for you to build your own (tiny!) working agent.

What Participants Will Learn:

  • How to recognize which problems are well-suited for an agentic solution
  • Practical guidance on source selection: APIs, scrapers, and RSS, and when each is worth the maintenance burden
  • Classification and filtering approaches that reduce false positives
  • Realistic cost and hosting expectations for a small-scale production agent
  • Where human editorial review remains necessary, and how to disclose LLM-generated content responsibly
  • A repeatable checklist you can apply to your own monitoring or newsletter workflow


Speakers

  • Andrew Gruen, Senior Fellow, Future of Privacy Forum
  • Stacey Gray, Senior Director, FPF Center for Artificial Intelligence

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Speakers

Stacey Gray

Senior Director for Artificial Intelligence , FPF

Stacey Gray is the Senior Director for Future of Privacy Forum’s Center for Artificial Intelligence and supports FPF’s U.S. engagement for consumer privacy research, analysis, and policymaker education. At FPF, she has spent many years focusing on the privacy implications of data collection in online and mobile advertising, platform regulation, cross-device tracking, Smart Homes, and the Internet of Things, including publishing extensive work and providing Congressional testimony on the intersection of emerging technologies and federal privacy regulation and enforcement. Stacey graduated from the University of Florida in 2010, and cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015, during which she worked in privacy-related civil rights litigation as a law clerk for Victor M. Glasberg & Associates, and as a member of the civil rights division of the Institute for Public Representation.

Selected Publications and Events:

Senate Testimony (April 9, 2020), Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, “Enlisting Big Data in the Fight Against Coronavirus” Infographic (May 22, 2020), “Understanding the World of Location Data“ FPF Blog (Mar. 25, 2020), “A Closer Look at Location Data: Privacy and Pandemics“ Public Comments (Mar. 11, 2020) to the California Attorney General on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) FPF Blog (Feb. 25, 2020), “Close to the Finish Line: Observations on the Washington Privacy Act“ Guest Expert (November 27, 2018, Brussels), “Digital Data Flows Masterclass: Location Data: GPS, Wi-Fi, and Spatial Analytics“ IAPP Privacy Perspectives (Dec. 1, 2016) “How industry can protect privacy in the age of connected toys“ White Paper (April 28, 2016) “Always On: Privacy Implications of Microphone-Enabled Devices” White Paper (Oct. 27, 2015), “Cross-Device: Understanding the State of State Management

Andrew Gruen

Senior Fellow, FPF

Andrew Gruen is a consultant and technology executive, supporting pro-social tech development. He is the principal consultant at Working Paper, where he helps clients develop evidence-based solutions to policy and governance issues. Andrew is also a Senior Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum where he facilitates the National Science Foundation funded Research Coordination Network on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and a Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics, where he focuses on the implementation of Europe’s new Digital Services Act.

Andrew previously served in multiple product and policy roles at Meta Platforms, including the head of joint planning for research and policy in the Policy Planning org, and head of governance for the company’s US 2020 Election Research Project (which published in Science and Nature). In addition he started the Academic Partnerships team, and was Meta’s representative to the European Digital Media Observatory‘s data sharing working groups. As Chief Communications Officer at Seven Bridges, a firm that develops tools to analyze genomic sequencing data at population scale, he led the company’s marketing, business development, and partnerships, including the company’s participation in the White House’s Cancer Moonshot program, with a particular focus on more creating more accurate, less invasive, genomics-based cancer diagnostics. As a Luce Scholar, Andrew worked in South Korea for the world’s largest citizen journalism organization, OhmyNews.

Learn more about Andrew here.