EQUS is building technology designed to give individuals greater ownership and control over the data, identity, and reputation that power their AI experiences. The company is developing consumer and enterprise capabilities around personal AI, portable data, verifiable credentials, and trusted agentic action, with the premise that the layer between a person and an AI model should belong to the individual rather than the platform. Pulse 2.0 interviewed EQUS CEO Sandy Carter to learn more.
AMIT: Q.) Could you tell me more about your background?
SANDY CARTER: I spent most of my career in big tech, growing multibillion-dollar businesses at IBM and AWS. After that, I helped take Unstoppable.ai to unicorn status. While there, I started Unstoppable Women of AI because women in technical AI roles are still rare, and I wanted to do something about that directly. I’m also the author of multiple technology and business books, including the bestselling book, AI First, Human Always, and I write a column at Forbes on AI.
Earlier in my career, a manager once told me my real strength wasn’t the technology itself; it was translating it into something people could actually use. That’s shaped most of what I’ve done since.
I became CEO of EQUS because I kept watching AI companies build assistants that know everything about the people using them, while the people themselves don’t have ownership over their own data. It was clear to me that the users had no control over how the models use that data to train, target, and advertise. I wanted to find a solution to this very important issue.
Q.) How did the idea for EQUS get started?
SANDY CARTER: Personal AI is quickly becoming the most individual technology that consumers have access to on a daily basis. Almost none of those personal AIs are owned by the user. Neither is the data that makes them work. That’s the gap we see in the market. We’re building EQUS to close that specific gap.
In essence, we are architecting the layer between people and the AI that acts for them, and we’re creating this layer so that the data you share with your personal AI belongs to you rather than to the platform. To me, as the CEO, it’s imperative that everything we build has to answer that mission.
At EQUS, we envision a world where every person owns their identity and the reputation built on it. A world where your AI works for you and answers only to you, and where nobody has to trade away their privacy to get the benefits of technology.
Deloitte’s 2025 Connected Consumer Survey found that fewer than half of respondents, 48 percent, believe the benefits of online services outweigh their privacy concerns, down from 58 percent in 2024 and the lowest since 2019. That is the first time in a decade the trade has stopped looking obviously worth it to people.
Sentiment like that rarely converts to switching on its own, but it does make people receptive when something else forces the issue.
In that world, people get back the two things the internet took from them. Their time, and their say over how their data is used. And that’s the world we hope to create through our solutions
Q.) What has been your favorite memory in building the company so far?
SANDY CARTER: The day our first beta program went live! That’s my favorite day so far.
We’ve spent our time explaining data ownership in white papers and on panels, and it always landed as an abstraction. Important, but abstract. Then our beta testers got their hands on it and the comments started coming in. “We love this.” “We need this.” And the one that got me: “Oh, now I understand what you mean by data ownership.”
That’s the moment. The moment the idea stopped being something we were arguing for and became something people had just experienced. You can’t pitch your way to that sentence. Somebody has to actually use our service to understand why data ownership and privacy-first AI matter now more than ever.
Q.) Have you recently faced any challenges in your sector of work (and how did you overcome those challenges)?
SANDY CARTER: One challenge that made the risk AI users face become more concrete to me was when my own AI agent rejected a long-term vendor. The rejection happened because my AI agent had used outdated, average ratings without understanding their context. The vendor had already fixed the exact issue the agent had flagged and tanked its score.
I ended up writing about the experience, laying out a framework I call PROOF for how people and companies can actually audit and correct what AI has on file about them, instead of just hoping it’s accurate. I recently shared the PROOF framework in a guest post for the Drucker Forum.
Q.) What market is the company pursuing?
SANDY CARTER: On the consumer side, our solution is for the mainstream. It’s for people living an ordinary, connected tech life who want AI that’s useful in their day to day lives. They just don’t want to hand over everything about themselves to get it.
On the enterprise side, our solutions include a Developer Toolkit. The first capability we are rolling out is identity credentials built for the EU regulatory timetable, which is based on the digital identity work we have done over the last decade. We’re starting with a private beta open to several organizations with whom we’ve been in conversation as we developed our enterprise offering.
Our private beta is for companies that do business in Europe and conduct identity or anti-money laundering (AML) checks on their customers. By July 2027 they will need to accept digital credentials as proof of identity verification due to the AMLR and eIDAS 2 are European regulations with upcoming deadlines that will reshape how people share data about themselves. Through the Developer Toolkit, we also support AP2, which is the Agent Payments Protocol. It handles trust at the payment rail layer, which is where EQUS’s two-sided credentials and delegated authority sit upstream of it.
Add those two groups together and that’s the market we’re chasing.
Q.) As you mentioned above, EQUS’s whole premise is that the data making your AI useful should belong to you, not the platform. What does “owning” your AI actually mean in practice? Is it a legal right, a technical one, or something else?
SANDY CARTER: It’s not a legal right yet. Today it’s technical. Does the data actually sit somewhere you control, can you see everything that’s been shared, and can you pull it back, file by file, whenever you want, can you take it with you? That’s the difference between owning something and just being handed a privacy settings page.
The warning sign is that your history and, most importantly, your reputation, end up sitting in someone else’s solution that nobody can inspect, on a platform you can’t petition. Ownership has to mean you can see it, correct it, take it with you, and take it back. Otherwise, it’s not ownership; it’s a conditional courtesy the platform extends until it decides not to.
Q.) What differentiates EQUS from its competition?
SANDY CARTER: Most platforms decide what they know about you and hold onto it, and that’s their business model. EQUS flips that model on its head. The data and the reputation are yours, and every credential we issue only discloses what a given interaction actually needs. Your data is not our business.
There’s a bigger issue underneath that may one day come to be true. A lot of the AI world is drifting toward one universal reputation score for everyone and everything. That’s a dangerous approach. A single number like that becomes something people and companies can game, and pretty soon you’ve eventually built a social credit system, just with better branding.
The future EQUS and I imagine is a different one. It would be one enabled by another pathway. One built from your own authenticated actions, not a score someone else assigns to you.
Q.) What are some of your company’s future goals?
SANDY CARTER: Our arc is simple: own, delegate, represent. Today, we want people to own their data.
In the future, they delegate real authority to an AI that acts for them. Eventually that AI represents them.
Three goals get us there.
First, credentials that work in both directions. Not just proving who a person is but proving what their agent is authorized to do on their behalf. That’s the two-sided credential.
For people, we could credential what a person has or owns like a diploma, a watch, a piece of art. Anything with provenance worth proving.
Second, reputation built on facts, not scores. Trust has always been earned by a human identity over time. Agents have no such history, and they’re about to act everywhere at once. Reputation has to be rebuilt from what verifiable credentials carry: checkable facts, anchored to the person who authorized the action.
Third, trusted agentic action. Commerce is where it gets real first, and the payment rail is the solvable part, and the industry is converging on that with AP2. The hard part sits upstream. Did this agent have authority, from whom, within what limits, and can anyone verify it afterward.
Q.) You’ve written that reputation used to be something AI described to a human, and now it’s something AI acts on directly, in milliseconds. What should a person, or a company, be doing right now to make sure that record is accurate, and actually theirs?
SANDY CARTER: Start by assuming the record already exists. Whether you curated it or not, there is a version of you assembled from fragments across systems you don’t control, and agents are already reading it. So the first move is not to build a reputation. It’s to go find the one you have.
Then ensure 3 things.
- Grab your EQUS X personal AI in October. This ensures that what you want to stay private is owned by you.
- Insist on portability. That’s the whole test of ownership. If your record lives in someone else’s system and dies when you leave, it was never yours. You were renting it!
- Make sure you read the T&Cs for any AI tool that you use. Privacy is more than just training data. It includes what companies can use for targeting and advertising.
All three of these are all equally important.
When machines are deciding in milliseconds, you want the record to be something you hold, not something you hope is fair.
