Your board and investors are pushing you to accelerate AI adoption. They’re right to worry. Competitors going “AI First” stand to achieve significant competitive advantage, and your teams are already using ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools regardless of whether you’ve formally approved them.
Most CEOs view today’s emerging AI vendors like any other enterprise software purchase, demanding rapid integrations focused solely on competitive upside. Wthout proper frameworks, they risk two critical failures: wasting budget and leaving ROI on the table through unclear goals and unmeasured outcomes, while simultaneously expanding their attack surface and inviting disruptive security incidents.
The Challenges
Many AI products are early iterations requiring extraordinary access to your business and customer data, and many vendors are new and moving fast. Without deliberate buy-side governance, organizations can’t prevent redundant tool purchases or ensure sensitive data remains protected. Since 2024, supply chain security incidents at Salesloft Drift, Gainsight, and 3CX affected hundreds of organizations, while AI platforms like Hugging Face and PyPI saw malicious models targeting developers directly.
The pressure to adopt AI is intense. The consequences of doing it wrong are severe. You need a framework that lets you move forward confidently: formally codified goals and anti-goals for each AI tool, established best practices, procurement standards, policies, visibility, monitoring, and testing. Without these, you can’t measure what you’re getting or protect what you have.
Our Approach
The EPSD Executive AI Governance Intensive is a structured, time-boxed engagement designed for CEOs, COOs, and CTOs who need to establish governance that accelerates AI adoption while managing cost and risk. Our advisors have managed AI governance at enterprise scale, responded to major incidents, and helped companies establish frameworks that work in practice, not just theory, to maximize the returns on your AI investment.
We start with discovery, helping executives understand the AI platforms in use (regardless of whether you know about them) and how your teams have integrated them. We examine your existing governance, procurement, business transformation, and information security frameworks to assess their readiness for AI adoption and augment them where necessary to ensure they’re fit for purpose. We review with your business leaders the suitability of the AI software they’ve planned or deployed for their business purposes and goals.
Then we bring your executive leadership together for an intensive half-day session focused on three critical areas:
Risk Enumeration and Threat Modeling: We help you understand AI-specific business and information security vulnerabilities and where your exposure lies. Drawing on our extensive, real-world experience with implementations and incident handling, we show you what happens when supplier security, implementation, configuration, or integration fails and how to avoid those outcomes.
Blast Radius Reduction: We provide pragmatic guidance so your business leaders can understand your readiness and capacity to contain potential incidents before they happen. The term “blast radius” refers to the scope of damage an incident can cause. Understanding the blast radius of your AI integrations means answering: how bad would it be if something went wrong? You’ll learn what questions to ask your teams to assess blast radius for each integration; how to structure integrations to limit exposure; and ensure you protect your most sensitive systems and data.
Instrumentation and Alerting: We share specifics on establishing monitoring and measurement systems that support your response capabilities. Proper instrumentation ensures you know what is happening in your AI environment and can act quickly when issues arise.
What You Get
Discovery and Assessment: We analyze your current AI usage, integrations, and existing frameworks through structured questionnaires and targeted interviews with your technical and business leads.
Executive Intensive Workshop: A focused session with your CEO, COO, CTO, general counsel, product, and revenue leaders. We deliver this remotely or in-person based on your needs, facilitating the critical conversations your leadership team needs about AI governance at your organization.
Customized AI Governance Playbook: You receive a framework document tailored to your organization that guides implementation and communication of everything we discuss in the workshop. This is not generic advice, but a practical playbook customized for your specific situation, platforms, and risk profile.
The entire engagement takes four weeks from discovery to final playbook delivery. You finish with clarity about your AI risks, alignment across your executive team, and a concrete plan for moving forward.
Why This Matters Now
Companies are integrating AI at enterprise scale without the frameworks to extract maximum value or manage the risks. New regulations like the EU AI Act are establishing requirements, and recent supply chain incidents demonstrate the cost of unmanaged AI adoption.
The companies that establish AI governance now (codifying goals and anti-goals, setting procurement and data minimization standards, implementing monitoring and testing) will move faster and achieve greater returns on AI investment than competitors who wait for an incident to force action.
EPSD brings deep technical expertise in AI governance and security strategy. We help you establish the standards and guardrails that let you adopt AI aggressively without adopting it recklessly. Many clients engage us to execute the recommendations we make, from architecture to organizational change.
Ready to move forward? Let’s talk.