AI governance lead
The one who decides who may deploy what
An AI governance lead writes the internal rules that say who may deploy what, and on which data, like a house rulebook that exists before the incident does.
- Floor 4The Organisation
- P0Does not touch code
- Emerging titleIt appeared recently. What it covers is not yet stable from one employer to the next.
What they answer for
The deliverableA written framework, known and applied: what is permitted, by whom, on which data. If they leave, everyone decides alone, and nobody knows any more who decided what.
The profile
Five activities, scored 0 to 3- ResearchProducing knowledge that does not yet exist.
- BuildShipping a system that runs, deploys and breaks.
- OperateKeeping it in production: cost, incidents, drift, on-call.
- VerifyMeasuring, testing, attacking. Producing a verdict that holds.
- LeadDeciding, persuading, driving adoption, answering to others.
What the work is
What the function settles
The function settles a question nobody else can: how far a team may go on its own. With no written answer, everyone settles it privately, and the heaviest decisions end up taken by the people with the least information. It is a function of arbitration before it is a function of control.
Why prohibition fails
Blanket prohibition always fails the same way. The tools are reachable from a browser, so the use does not disappear, it becomes invisible: you lose the trace, you lose control of the data, and you keep the risk while believing you removed it. Governance that works opens practicable paths and watches the others.
The trap
The trap is the reporting line. The function has no power of its own: it borrows that of the executive carrying it. Placed too low, it produces charters nobody reads; attached to the executive with no operational relay, it writes principles no team knows how to apply. Both failures are common and look nothing alike.
A week in the role
- Arbitration: may this team use that tool on this data, and under what conditions.
- Writing rules, short ones, or nobody will read them.
- Exchanges with compliance, legal and security, who do not want the same thing.
- Usage measurement, without which you govern what you imagine rather than what happens.
Ways in
- From IT leadership or security, where arbitration is already the trade.
- From change management, provided you obtain authority to decide and not merely to convene.
- What the role does not require: knowing how to program. It requires knowing whom to ask.
Reading an advert
2 signs- The advert describes a charter to be written, and nothing after it.
- A charter with no enforcement is a document. Ask what happens when a team does not follow it.
- The word "forbid" appears more often than the word "allow".
- The organisation is still in its refusal phase. Clandestine use is probably already established, and that will be your first job.