PRACTICE · V · TRUSTED AI
Governance for agents that act.
ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act, and twenty-plus US state AI laws. None of it kills your deployment on its own. But bolted on at week eleven, all of it does. We embed the controls into the SDLC so the question on procurement’s desk is “which policy already covers this?” instead of “why didn’t anyone think about this six months ago?”
The 2026 risk isn’t an AI that says the wrong thing — it’s an agent that does the wrong thing. Before any agent ships, three questions have answers in writing: what it may decide, when it must stop, and who owns the outcome. Every agent runs under its own identity — scoped credentials, full audit trail — with non-human identity managed with the same discipline as human identity. 21% of surveyed organizations have a mature governance model for agentic AI (Deloitte’s 2026 report on scaling AI agents). This pillar is how you join them.
The hardest part of a governance program isn’t the framework. It’s reconciling four overlapping ones: ISO 42001 wants a management system, NIST wants a risk register, the EU AI Act wants a conformity assessment, and California, Colorado, Texas, New York, Illinois, and the rest each want something a little different. The cost of getting this wrong isn’t a fine. It’s the deployment that ships, then quietly stops shipping.
We do it the other way: a single control set, mapped once across all four registers, and enforced by the same CI checks that already run on your code. Governance stops being a quarterly review and becomes part of the commit graph, the way SOC 2 already is.
On the governance question
Procurement is not the enemy. Procurement is the first honest stress test a deployment gets. Pass it on the first try, or build the controls that let you.
START · THE GOVERNANCE BRIEF
See where you actually stand.
Take the full Agentic Readiness Assessment to baseline governance alongside the other five dimensions. Ten minutes, honest answers, a prioritized plan back.