Vania La Rocca

Vania La Rocca is an AI product leader and writer exploring the intersection of technology, ethics, regulation and society. Born and raised in Italy by two parents who studied law and built careers in public administration, she grew up with law as part of everyday life — an early exposure to questions of rules, rights, responsibility and how societies decide what is acceptable.

After studying Latin and Ancient Greek, she chose a very different path into engineering and technology. Since starting her career in 2009, Vania has built technology products across industries, most recently leading AI product organisations at Cerence AI, where she worked on generative AI, conversational systems and agentic architectures for the automotive industry.

Today, she works at Webidoo, an Italian technology company that builds specialised AI tools designed to give small and medium-sized businesses capabilities previously available mainly to larger organisations.

Her work sits at the intersection of technology and the real world: how AI is built, deployed and governed when safety, reliability, privacy, economics and regulation all matter at once.

Vania holds an AI Ethics, Regulation and Compliance qualification from Oxford’s Saïd Business School and is particularly interested in the questions that emerge as AI becomes infrastructure rather than novelty: Who decides how these systems behave? What happens when product decisions become governance decisions? And how do we make sure that the technology we build strengthens human agency rather than quietly replacing it? Her perspective comes from living between disciplines — engineering and law, product and policy, technological possibility and societal responsibility.