The most important tool for governing artificial intelligence responsibly is one that most companies already own: the privacy program built years ago. That is the central lesson Sahil Razdan has drawn from a career spent where data privacy, technology and advertising meet. Now senior legal counsel at Samsung Electronics Canada and chair of the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (IAB Canada) AI and Emerging Technology Committee, Razdan has watched AI move from a distant concern to a daily one, and is convinced the lawyers who handle it best treat it as an extension of privacy, not a separate discipline.
From a winding-down employer to data privacy law
His own path into the work was unplanned. Early in his career, Razdan took an in-house role only to discover the company was being wound down. “[I] found out on my first day on the job and got thrown really directly into commercial litigation,” he says, describing international contract disputes that ran across the company’s global offices. He and another junior lawyer handled it with no research tools or mentorship, on a simple brief: “Here’s the problems, figure out how to fix them.” That start, he says, taught him to move quickly and trust his own judgment instead of waiting for direction.
From there, he moved through a series of data privacy and technology roles as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and Canada’s privacy laws were taking shape, then into private practice at Torkin Manes LLP to sharpen those skills before returning in-house in media. His longest stint came at Postmedia Network Inc., where he served as director, legal, during the publisher’s shift from print to digital. That transition raised fresh questions about data protection and monetizing digital properties, and pulled him onto the commercial side of the business. The job, he says, became as much about translation as law: “How do I manage the legal side with the business side and give the legal advice and bridge that with the business advice.”
That bridge is the theme Razdan returns to most. Working in-house means advising colleagues who lack a legal background, and he is clear about how lawyers undermine themselves. “Lawyers get seen as the roadblock rather than … a helpful hand,” he says. His answer is to learn the business first – its goals, pressures and each unit’s pain points – so advice lands in terms the recipient understands. The reason it matters: the two sides do not always align. “What’s good legal advice might not be good for the business. What’s good for the business might not be 100 [percent] legal,” he says, and “the most valuable lesson that I’ve learned is to be able to bridge that gap in the middle.”
Privacy by design in Samsung’s ad tech and AI
At Samsung, that gap runs straight through ad tech – the technology used to place and measure advertising across digital platforms, from websites to connected televisions. Razdan manages the Samsung Ads business from a legal perspective, where targeted streaming-TV advertising sits alongside firm rules on consent and data protection. He treats the balance as fixed: the company secures the consents it needs – following the federal privacy regulator’s meaningful-consent guidelines – and protects user data, “especially when it comes to … children under the age of 18 who are using our devices,” while still giving consumers the functionality they expect. AI now runs through the hardware, from the Bixby assistant to features in Samsung’s televisions, but he stresses that adoption stays with the user. “It’s integrated, but it’s also up to the user if they want to use it or not,” he says.
This is where Razdan’s faith in privacy infrastructure becomes concrete. “The basic building blocks of managing AI responsibly come from your privacy structures that you’ve built in an organization,” he says, and Samsung’s are well established. “When you work with the ideas of privacy by design and transparency and getting the proper consents and managing those consents the correct way, you have the basic building blocks of managing an AI infrastructure as well,” he says – which, in his telling, makes adding AI far smoother than building governance from scratch. Other Canadian general counsel take a similar view, including one who argues AI governance is no one-size-fits-all exercise.
Setting AI standards across the ad industry
His IAB Canada role widens that view from one company to a whole industry sprinting to keep up. “AI in general is moving at light speed,” he says, and advertising is no exception. When he took on the committee, AI was a concept “coming down the pipeline”; within a year, it was everywhere. The committee’s purpose, as he describes it, is not to govern but to set the industry standards and contracting terms used across digital advertising – terms now built into most ad tech deals and used to reconcile clashing privacy regimes across borders. He plays down the rivalry among members, arguing that “everybody has to work together for the entire marketplace to work,” and notes the IAB also feeds industry insight to federal and provincial officials as Canada works to move closer to the European GDPR standard amid ongoing changes to Canada’s data privacy laws, including Bill C-36, introduced in June 2026.
Advice for lawyers in technology law
For lawyers building a career in technology law, his advice is to go deep rather than broad. Once a general grasp of technology sufficed; now that anyone can query a chatbot, “you really need to have an in-depth and intricate understanding of the technology rather than just … a passable understanding,” he says. He is measured about AI in legal work itself – useful for research and pulling sources together, but not yet something to lean on heavily, because the stakes demand a human check. “Missing a word here or there or missing a … clause here or there in a contract can be the difference of millions of dollars,” he says. The practical uses were detailed in an Association of Corporate Counsel toolkit guiding in-house lawyers on AI adoption.
Razdan makes the case for keeping the human in the loop: lawyers spent “decades honing our skills,” he says, and “if you don’t [use them], you lose it.”
Sahil Razdan is a member of the Canadian Lawyer Leaders Network.
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