AI governance platforms wait for customers to catch up

Agentic AI initiatives, where AI makes decisions autonomously, will drive broader adoption of AI governance platforms as the technology expands, says Litan. “Agentic is so unpredictable and can go off the rails so easily that it’ll have to be reigned in with controls,” she says. Today, many companies use manual reviews and policies, but autonomous agents, when they take off over the next two years, will move so fast that companies won’t be able to control it with manual methods. “There’s a lot of hype but not a lot of adoption,” she adds. “It’ll take a couple of years to get down to the plateau of productivity” — Gartner-speak for mainstream adoption.

AI governance platforms can help CIOs monitor model performance, detect bias, enforce policies, and streamline compliance reviews, says Lisa Palmer, CEO and CAIO at Dr. Lisa AI, an AI business strategy consultancy. They can detect bias and fairness issues in models, provide model explainability (such as feature attribution and heatmaps), and monitor model performance, drift, and compliance in real time, she writes in her CIO Advisory Guide, 5 Strategic AI Governance Priorities Every CIO/CAIO Must Own.

“Tools like Fiddler, TruEra, and Credo AI can surface explainability gaps, track data lineage, and ensure models behave as expected in production,” she says. “What they can’t do is replace human judgment, define business value, or automatically align AI use cases with strategic priorities.”