The AI Governance Function encompasses the roles responsible for ensuring an organisation's use of artificial intelligence is trustworthy, compliant, and sustainable. It covers the policies, frameworks, risk processes, and controls that govern how AI systems are built, deployed, monitored, and retired. In the context of AI-assisted knowledge work, it is accountable for the accuracy, provenance, and timeliness of the information AI systems surface to employees.
Note: In most enterprises this is not a single settled team, but we are including it here as it is to make our key point that it is compliance focused and not experience or content focused.
Governance responsibilities are typically distributed across Legal, Compliance, Risk, IT, and Data functions, often without a common reporting line or shared mandate. The IAPP reports that AI governance professionals sit across ethics, compliance, privacy, and legal teams in roughly equal measure. A notable structural gap is that the people who own content quality, taxonomy, and metadata (whose work is directly load-bearing for AI retrieval) often sit outside the AI governance reporting line entirely, in IT or a Digital Workplace function.