4 strategic shifts for your AI governance program

The concept of governance carries much baggage. Your users might assume it involves cumbersome paperwork, lost time, and complex requirements. But governance can be a seamless and minimally disruptive experience if you focus on two key aspects: innovation and automation.

"My highest priority [with IGP] is reducing compliance fatigue," says Mathur. "Data owners have day jobs. They don't have time to read all these hundreds of regulations. And just having standards listed out isn't going to work. They need technology to enable their understanding of how to meet those regulations."

IBM is infusing AI into IGP to reduce the manual effort required of both our users and our governance and compliance officers. For example, proactive notifications that identify and flag potential compliance issues early save time and frustration. And we're not shying away from what Cox calls "impossible challenges" that can fundamentally change the governance experience, like do-it-for-me capabilities enabled by automation and agentic AI.

"Ultimately, I don't want a user to just be notified about a potential issue. I want IGP to act as a risk advisor that provides recommendations and then acts on the user's informed decisions." Agentic risk advisor capabilities are coming to IGP later this year.

Scalability is key to AI governance as an accelerator. Governance impacts many different personas across the enterprise. Some, like risk and compliance officers, are obvious. Others, like designers and sellers, are not.

Building a governance program that is an enabler and not an impediment means to scale to more personas and understanding how governance can be an accelerator for their work.

As IBM developed the system that underpins IGP, "we always made sure we were listening to the client-and in this case, the client was IBM," explains Mathur. For example, the IBM AI Model & Data Catalog is integrated with IGP, saving developers and data scientists time with ready access to models and datasets that are precleared for potential reuse.

When it comes to user experience, don't settle for good enough. Capitalize on the close partnerships that you've developed across the enterprise to get insights about personas and use cases. Ask yourself: How do we simplify the process even more? Where can we make it more lightweight? What would make governance feel less like an impediment and more like an accelerator?