Artificial intelligence is moving from concept to deployment in food safety, with vendors offering tools for predictive risk identification, automated record review, supplier monitoring, and increasingly, agentic systems that act rather than merely analyze. The pressure to adopt is real, but so is the risk of premature deployment. Dr. Ben Miller will discuss a structured way to think about both readiness and reliability. This session will discuss the FoodSAFE-AI framework he developed with Dr. Claire Zoellner, which evaluates organizational preparedness across three business areas, organizational buy-in and problem definition, IT infrastructure and data acumen, and food safety program maturity and agility, against four stages of automation from information acquisition through action implementation. Brief case examples illustrate how readiness varies by company and use case. Dr. Miller will also discuss a question the framework raises but does not fully resolve: how do we validate and verify AI systems, especially agentic ones, with the rigor food safety has long applied to preventive controls and CCPs? Drawing on HACCP validation principles, he proposes a starting set of validation and verification questions food safety leaders can use to evaluate any AI deployment, including those tied to emerging FSMA 204 data flows.