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 Tiarne Hawkins is the CEO & Founder of Optica Labs, a pioneering AI assurance company securing the world’s highest-risk AI systems for Government, Enterprise and AI startups through adaptive stress testing, vulnerability detection, and real-world scenario intelligence. With more than 15 years of experience in digital transformation and over 7 years leading frontier AI initiatives, she is widely recognized for translating powerful AI into systems that are trustworthy, resilient, and safe to deploy at scale.

Tiarne’s career began in Australia, where she founded her first company at just 22 years old. The firm specialized in digital transformation consulting and recruitment and later merged with industry leader Salt. Under her leadership, the business expanded across Asia, the UK, and Dubai, scaling to $37M in annual revenue prior to a successful exit. She later joined the global executive team of a U.S.-based firm, contributing to its rapid growth from $500M to $900M in revenue.

In 2017, Tiarne joined Playable AI, helping position AI-powered video editing and email marketing technology for major entertainment brands including Disney and ESPN. By 2019, she led the launch of the AI training division at Welocalize (now Welo Data), driving advances in machine translation, multilingual language models, and large-scale AI data pipelines. Her work supported critical AI programs for many of the world’s most influential technology companies, including Google, Amazon, AWS, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft.

Before founding Optica Labs, Tiarne served as an Industry Strategist at Invisible Technologies, where she designed next-generation AI training strategies for large language models and agentic systems. Her work spanned frontier and enterprise deployments for organizations such as OpenAI, Meta, xAI, Nvidia, Cohere, and Amazon.

At Optica Labs, Tiarne’s vision is to bring AI testing, evaluation, validation, and verification to the same rigor expected in aerospace and other safety-critical industries by 2030. Every major platform shift creates a new infrastructure layer. For AI, that layer is assurance.

Today, more than 80% of AI initiatives stall before reaching production—not due to model performance, but due to lack of confidence, observability, and failure predictability. As global AI spend accelerates toward $2 trillion, the absence of assurance is turning ambition into waste, burning billions through stalled programs, rework, and failed deployments.

Optica Labs is building the AI assurance layer that turns risk into acceleration. Unlike consulting firms offering one-time audits or testing tools that operate in isolation, Optica is a continuous testing, evaluation, validation, and verification platform that uses real-world scenarios and behavioral personas to predict, diagnose, and trace AI failures before they cascade. This enables organizations to identify low-risk use cases, pinpoint guardrail erosion, concentrate mitigation efforts, and maintain full compliance traceability across the AI lifecycle.

Optica Labs was named a Top 20 Dual-Use Technology Startup in Washington, D.C., and is now moving from pre-seed into its seed round—positioned to define assurance as foundational infrastructure for AI innovation.

The company combines deep technical rigor with strategic clarity, emphasizing behavioral realism, proactive transparency, and continuous intelligence delivered through automated AI agents and expert human analysts. 

Tiarne leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, and experts from national security, government, and leading technology platforms, all focused on strengthening global AI deployments.

Tiarne is also the author of The Negotiation: AI, Power, and What It Means to Stay Human, forthcoming in 2026. The book examines the quiet trade AI systems offer society—not coercion, but convenience—and reveals how speed and personalization are exchanged for power, autonomy, and trust. The Negotiation argues that the most dangerous AI failures do not explode; they erode.

A sought-after public speaker and media voice, Tiarne hosts the You & AI podcast, featuring conversations with global leaders, technologists, and cultural figures on AI’s impact on humanity, economic stability, and national security. She regularly delivers keynotes and workshops at premier events including CES, AI Summit New York, AI Boston, and Voice & AI, and collaborates with organizations such as HPE, Nvidia, Intel, AWS, and VMware on AI policy, ethics, and customer-centric innovation.

Tiarne is deeply committed to technology for good and works with organizations operating at the edge of technological risk—helping them move faster without sacrificing trust, accountability, or human agency.