Playbook

AI governance and controls playbook

Enterprise AI does not fail because teams care too much about controls. It fails because controls are added late, mapped poorly, or disconnected from how the workflow actually operates.

Get the Control Templates Read the Production Guide
Governance map
Control stack
5 Required control families
96%
Target evidence coverage
3
Risk-based gate types
24 hrs Incident review target
100% Action logging
Least Privilege default
Direct answer

The core controls every production AI workflow needs

The minimum set is consistent across most enterprise workflows: access control, policy enforcement, approval design, audit evidence, and release evaluation. If any one of these is missing, the operating risk shifts to humans improvising outside the system.

Least privilege

Limit every tool and identity to the smallest useful action scope. Separate read, draft, and execute permissions so unsafe autonomy is impossible by default.

Policy and allowlists

Define what the agent can access, which actions are permitted, and what content or destinations are blocked before the agent can call tools.

Evidence and review

Capture prompts, retrieved context, tool actions, confidence signals, overrides, and final outcomes so reviewers can reconstruct a decision path.

Control system

How to place approval gates without stalling operations

Gate 1

Pre-action review

Use before a payment, message send, policy exception, or system update. The reviewer sees the recommendation, rationale, source evidence, and intended action.

Gate 2

Threshold review

Use when confidence scores, retrieval quality, or classification certainty fall below the release threshold. The agent routes to manual handling instead of guessing.

Gate 3

Exception review

Use when the workflow encounters a novel case, policy conflict, or missing data pattern. This gate prevents silent drift from becoming a production habit.

Framework mapping

Map controls to recognizable frameworks without turning the page into a compliance claim

Use OWASP-informed control language

  • Prompt and tool abuse risk belongs in pre-execution policy checks.
  • Data leakage risk belongs in retrieval boundaries, redaction, and role-based access.
  • Excessive agency risk belongs in approval design, action scopes, and rollback planning.

Use NIST AI RMF as an operating map

  • Govern: name accountability, ownership, and risk review cadence.
  • Map: document workflow boundaries, actors, and action surfaces.
  • Measure: define evidence, thresholds, and monitoring signals.
  • Manage: specify mitigations, approvals, and remediation steps.
Evidence package

What security and risk reviewers need to inspect before launch

  • Workflow architecture summary with data sources, tools, identities, and operators
  • Control matrix that maps risk points to gates, policies, and evidence
  • Audit log examples showing input, context, action, reviewer, and final state
  • Evaluation results for happy path, edge cases, and prohibited actions
  • Incident and rollback procedure for failed tool calls or unsafe outputs
Templates

Control matrix and approval artifacts

Use the templates page for reusable control categories, gate logic, and review prompts.

 Insight

Human-in-the-loop approval gates

Read the operational pattern for placing approval boundaries without creating a queue disaster.
FAQs

Common governance design questions

The minimum set is least-privilege access, policy and allowlist checks, risk-based approvals, complete audit evidence, and evaluation gates tied to release management.
Place them before financial, legal, customer-impacting, or irreversible actions, and whenever confidence or retrieval quality drops below the release threshold.
Use it to structure accountability, measurement, and risk treatment decisions. It is most useful as an operating map for reviewers and builders, not as a one-line badge claim.

Need controls your security team can actually inspect?

We design approval gates, action boundaries, and evidence packs around the workflow itself, so governance is visible before production pressure hits.

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