Best way to give an AI governance committee a front door so it stops doing procurement's job?
something I've noticed over the last few months and want to double check with other CIOs.
we set up an AI governance committee early this year like everyone did. legal, security, a couple of business leads, me. the idea was policy and principles, deciding which use cases we're comfortable with.
what it's turned into is a buying queue. almost every agenda item is someone who wants to purchase an AI tool, and we spend the meeting asking the same questions every time. where does the data go, does the vendor train on it, who approved the budget, does it overlap with something we already pay for. more often than I'd like, the answer to that last one is yes
talking to peers, a few of them describe the same drift. the committee that was meant to set direction ends up doing vendor intake, badly, once a month
my theory is the committee isn't the problem. there's no front door for AI purchases, so the committee became one by default. the questions we ask are intake questions, and if they got answered before a request reached us we could go back to the policy work we were set up for
the other possibility is that this is just what AI governance looks like once it's real, and I should stop fighting it.
curious which one it is for you. did your committee end up doing procurement's job too?