Body of Knowledge · Glossary
AI governance
The explicit, proportionate policy for AI-assisted work. It says what the tools may be used for, what data may be sent where, what verification and disclosure each class of change requires, and who owns a change whatever produced it. It is scaled to the risk of the path and enforced in the pipeline where it can be.
Where the standard develops it
- TJ-5AI-assisted engineeringAdoption, governance, capability-building, and risk.
- TJ-3Code review and quality standardsIncluding standards for AI-generated code.
Related terms
- Aligned autonomy
- Direction, priorities and boundary standards set centrally, with methods left to teams.
- Build, buy, or AI service
- The three-way capability decision (build it, buy a product, or adopt an AI service), with each option weighed by the same questions: is this core, what is the lifetime cost, and where are we left if the provider or partner changes course?
- Bus factor
- The number of people who could leave before critical knowledge or capability is lost.
- Contract testing
- Automated verification of the agreement between a service and its consumers, which catches a breaking change at the boundary before integration does.
- Innovation budget
- An explicit, bounded allocation for evaluating new technology, with pilots that have criteria, a contained blast radius and an honest review.
- Interface discipline
- Versioning, a deprecation policy, contract tests and communicated change for a widely used interface.
- Paved road
- A well-supported default platform and toolchain that makes the good path the easy one.
- Service ownership
- Every service has a named owner responsible for its operation, its interface stability, its documentation and its future.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). AI governance. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.ai-governance). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/ai-governance