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. But without 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 Challenge
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 four-week engagement designed for CEOs, COOs, and CTOs who need to establish governance that accelerates AI adoption while managing cost and risk.
We start with discovery, understanding which AI platforms you use, how your teams have integrated them, and what governance, procurement, business transformation, and information security frameworks you already have in place. 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 real-world incidents, we show you what happens when supplier security fails and how to avoid those outcomes.
Blast Radius Reduction: We work with you to contain potential incidents before they happen. You learn how to structure AI integrations to limit exposure and protect your most sensitive systems and data.
Instrumentation and Alerting: We help you establish monitoring and response capabilities so you know what is happening in your AI environment and can act quickly when issues arise.
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.
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.