Your board wants AI. Your teams are building AI. Your governance? Still stuck in 2019.
The bottleneck isn’t the model. It’s the friction before deployment.
44% of organizations say their governance is too slow. Another 24% find it overwhelming. Nobody knows who to ask, what’s required, or how long it takes. So teams route around it-shadow AI becomes the norm.
That’s how you end up with data scientists training models on datasets nobody’s classified. Business units signing up for GenAI tools IT doesn’t know exist. Features shipping while legal still debates whether they’re allowed.
High-friction governance doesn’t reduce risk. It creates shadow systems that multiply it.
The fix isn’t stricter controls. It’s clearer, faster ones.
Classification at data ingestion, not before launch. Automated risk scoring, not committee reviews. One owner per use case, not shared accountability where nobody’s actually accountable.
The companies that ship fastest in 2026 won’t be the ones with the biggest models. They’ll be the ones whose governance clears the path instead of blocking it.
Does your AI governance enable velocity or block it?