Pillar
What AI governance is, who owns it inside the organization, and the controls that turn policy documents into evidence regulators accept.
In short
AI governance is the system of policies, roles, processes, and controls that direct how an organization develops, deploys, and uses AI. It is the connective tissue between AI strategy at the executive level and the day-to-day decisions engineers and analysts make about which models to build, which data to use, and which outputs to trust.
Why it matters
Most organizations adopting AI face the same problem: a written policy that reads well, an operational reality that does not match it, and no evidence either way when the regulator asks. The gap is governance. Without a working governance program, AI controls drift, accountability shifts ad hoc, and incidents go unmonitored until they escalate.
The regulatory direction is clear. NIST AI RMF's Govern function, ISO 42001's management-system clauses, EU AI Act Articles 9 and 16, and NAIC's Model Bulletin all expect documented governance with continuous evidence — not annual policy reviews. AI governance is moving from "a document on SharePoint" to "a running operational layer."
What's covered
Effective AI governance covers six surfaces: an AI inventory tiered by risk, a documented development and review process, fairness and accuracy testing standards, ongoing monitoring with thresholds, third-party AI risk management, and incident response. Each maps to specific evidence regulators look for.
Ownership varies by organization. Common patterns: a Chief Risk Officer or Chief AI Officer at the executive level; an AI Governance Council reviewing high-risk systems; a compliance officer producing evidence; CISOs covering data and security risk; CROs covering model and operational risk. Prism is built to serve all four roles from the same dataset.
NIST AI RMF (US, voluntary, federally favoured), ISO 42001 (international, certifiable), EU AI Act (binding for EU operations and high-risk systems), NAIC Model Bulletin (state-by-state for insurers), SR 11-7 (US banks). Smaller organizations typically pick one — increasingly NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001 — and map other obligations into it.
A governance program becomes real when it has continuous evidence: a maintained AI inventory, audit trails for every model decision, ongoing monitoring with alerts on thresholds, a vendor AI register, and an incident response playbook that has been exercised. Prism produces all five as a side-effect of running.
Treating governance as a documentation exercise. Concentrating ownership in one role with no operational tooling. Buying tools without defining the controls. Conflating GenAI hype with regulator expectations — most regulators care about the same risks they always did, just applied to AI surfaces.
How Prism helps
Projects organize models, datasets, and audit history per project for clean ownership.
Learn moreFive-dimension quality scoring on every trace; alerts on regression.
Learn moreStep-by-step record of every agent decision: LLM call, tool call, reasoning, memory access.
Learn moreLive registry of every consumer AI tool the workforce uses, with audit events.
Learn morePer-period exports for examiners and external auditors.
Learn moreRelated
NIST AI Risk Management Framework: Prism Compliance Mapping
Each NIST AI RMF function has subcategories that demand evidence. Prism produces it: from MEASURE-2.7 trace logs to MANAGE-2.1 adversarial test results.
ISO/IEC 42001 AI Management System
ISO 42001 is the first auditable management-system standard for AI. Prism produces the operational evidence each clause asks an internal auditor to see.
EU AI Act Compliance
The EU AI Act's high-risk category includes credit, employment, and insurance scoring. Prism is built to satisfy the logging, transparency, and oversight articles.
NAIC AI Model Governance
The NAIC Model Bulletin sets expectations for insurer use of AI. Prism produces the documentation, monitoring, and audit artifacts each pillar requires.
Model Risk Management for AI — SR 11-7 Revised Guidance
The interagency Revised Guidance on Model Risk Management supersedes SR 11-7 and SR 21-8. The three-pillar discipline carries forward, scaled to each bank's model risk profile. Prism produces the evidence at every tier.
AI compliance and risk management for banks
From underwriting copilots to fraud-screening agents, banks need the same model risk discipline they have for traditional models. Prism is built around it.
AI governance for insurance
Insurers face NAIC's Model Bulletin and a patchwork of state-level AI rules. Prism gives carriers one platform to produce the evidence each one demands.
AI risk management for fintech
Sponsor banks expect SR 11-7 hygiene. CFPB and state AGs care about ECOA. Prism makes both legible without slowing your release pace.
AI compliance for asset managers
From research copilots to trading-signal models, asset managers face SEC, FINRA, and SR 11-7 expectations on AI. Prism produces the evidence per system.
AI compliance for healthcare payers
PHI cannot reach a model unscrubbed. Prism Guardrails strip 18 Safe Harbor identifiers at ingestion; Prism X blocks employees from pasting PHI into consumer AI tools.
AI Observability
Glossary entry
AI Red Teaming
Glossary entry
Model Drift
Glossary entry
Prism
PRISMtrace is the observability and governance platform for teams running LLMs and AI agents in production. Capture traces, enforce guardrails, evaluate quality, and generate compliance evidence from one platform.
LLM Evaluations
Define quality rubrics, score every interaction, and catch regressions before users do, with automated evaluators that run on every trace or on a schedule you control.
Agent Observability
Trajectory evaluation decomposes multi-step agent runs into ordered steps and scores each run on goal adherence, tool compliance, efficiency, and safety, automatically on ingest.
Prism X
Prism X enforces data loss prevention policy in the browser, before prompts and uploads reach third-party AI services. Signed policy, real-time enforcement, audit-grade events.
One SDK. Five minutes. Full audit trails, PII redaction, and guardrail enforcement, from day one.