Insights

In a recent LinkedIn post, I asked why so many organizations are trying to assess AI as a standalone risk. I think that question gets to the heart of what is going wrong with much of the discussion around AI governance. There is no shortage of people trying to work out how organizations should govern AI. New frameworks are appearing, risk taxonomies are being built, internal audit teams are developing programs, and familiar questions are being asked about bias, security, compliance, privacy, and hallucinations.

The more time I've spent working in Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC), the more I've realized that a good risk assessment is rarely about preventing something from happening. It's about understanding what could happen, deciding whether the organization is comfortable with that level of risk, and making sure the right controls are in place before moving forward. That is a very different conversation.

Antimatter propulsion remains far beyond today's engineering reach. But AI may help turn the unknown into a development roadmap. The governance question is whether we can control the research before it outpaces us. A question that sounds like science fiction reveals a very practical governance problem: What happens when artificial intelligence accelerates a high-consequence technology faster than our institutions can regulate it?

For a long time, deleting data could feel strangely reckless. Storage was cheap, and information was potentially valuable. The cost of keeping another year of customer records, internal correspondence, transaction histories or old documents was difficult to see, while the cost of deleting the wrong thing was easy to imagine. So companies kept it. Some of it was retained for legal or operational reasons, some because nobody was quite sure whether it could safely be destroyed, and some because of the most durable retention policy in corporate life: we might need it someday.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about what I called the Draupnir Effect, borrowing from the golden ring in Norse mythology that produced eight new rings every ninth night. It seemed an appropriate metaphor for what I was watching happen across the GRC technology market. New risk applications, compliance tools, AI governance solutions, third-party risk platforms, control-testing engines, and supposedly comprehensive GRC platforms were appearing at an extraordinary pace, many of them built with a speed that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

Imagine the boardroom in 2036. Artificial intelligence has become part of how the company operates. It tests capital choices, monitors risk, compares strategic alternatives and makes thousands of decisions within limits established by management and the board.

In a founder-centric organization, the founder isn’t just the CEO. They’re the mascot, the mythology, the exception to the rules, and the emotional thermostat of the building. Identity, authority, and narrative all get bundled into one human nervous system. That’s efficient. It’s also a little like running a power grid through a single extension cord.