Governance
The AI Governance Checklist Every Company Needs
5 min read
Right now, your employees are using AI. The question is whether they are doing it safely. Without governance, you have people feeding proprietary data into consumer tools, using AI outputs without verification, and creating compliance risks nobody is tracking.
1. Acceptable Use Policy
- Define which AI tools are approved for business use
- Specify what types of data can and cannot be entered into AI tools
- Require human review of all AI-generated outputs before external use
- Prohibit use of consumer AI accounts for company work
- Establish clear consequences for policy violations
2. Data Handling Rules
- Classify data into tiers: public, internal, confidential, restricted
- Map which data tiers are permitted in which AI tools
- Require enterprise-grade AI tools with data retention controls
- Document where AI-processed data is stored and for how long
- Ensure AI vendors are included in your data processing agreements
3. Vendor Evaluation Criteria
- SOC 2 Type II compliance (at minimum)
- Clear data retention and deletion policies
- No training on your data without explicit consent
- API access for integration and audit trails
- Enterprise SLAs and support
4. Employee Guidelines
- Provide clear, written guidance on what AI can and cannot do well
- Train employees on prompt engineering basics and output verification
- Create department-specific AI usage guides with real examples
- Establish an AI champion in each department for questions and feedback
- Communicate regularly about new tools, updates, and best practices
5. Risk and Compliance
- Include AI in your existing risk management framework
- Track which AI tools are in use across the organization
- Establish an incident response plan for AI-related issues
- Review and update policies quarterly as the technology evolves
- Document AI decisions that impact customers or employees
This is not about slowing down AI adoption. It is about making sure you can go fast without breaking things. The companies that get governance right early are the ones that scale AI confidently.