The State of AI Governance: 4 Tips to Prioritize Responsible AI

Generative AI is shifting from experimental hype to practical implementation, and the key challenge for enterprises is no longer whether to adopt it, but how to do so safely and effectively. To explore how organizations are doing this, Pacific AI, in partnership with Gradient Flow, conducted the 2025 AI Governance Survey. The findings are grim: while enthusiasm for AI remains strong, governance maturity lags far behind.

The survey highlights significant gaps in how organizations manage AI risk and demonstrates the urgency for leadership to prioritize governance as a foundational element of their AI strategy. However, to build better, more responsible AI systems, we must first understand where the disconnect lies.

Adoption and Governance are Slow

Despite the public perception surrounding generative AI, real-world adoption remains modest. Just 30% of surveyed organizations have deployed generative AI in production, and only 13% manage multiple deployments. Larger enterprises are five times more likely than smaller firms to do so.

But this measured pace hasn't translated into safety. Nearly half of organizations (48%) don't monitor their AI systems for accuracy, drift, or misuse—fundamental pillars of responsible governance. Among small firms, that number drops to a staggering 9%. Limited resources and a lack of in-house expertise amplify these risks in smaller environments.

Time-to-Market > Safety

The most significant barrier to stronger AI governance isn’t technical complexity or regulatory ambiguity; it’s urgency. Nearly 45% of all respondents, and 56% of technical leaders, cited pressure to move quickly as the primary obstacle to effective governance. In many companies, governance is still perceived as a brake on innovation, rather than an accelerator of safe deployment.

This, however, is in vain. The absence of structured oversight often leads to preventable failures—issues that can stall projects, erode stakeholder trust, and attract regulatory scrutiny. Robust governance frameworks, including monitoring, risk assessments, and incident response protocols, enable teams to move faster and safer.

Policies Don't Mean Practice

While 75% of companies report having AI usage policies, fewer than 60% have designated governance roles or defined response playbooks in place. This signals a clear disconnect between policy and practice. Among small firms, the disparity is even greater—only 36% have governance leads and just 41% conduct annual AI training.

This “check-the-box” mentality suggests many organizations are treating governance as a compliance formality, rather than an essential consideration in the development process. Real governance means assigning ownership, integrating safeguards into workflows, and allocating resources to AI oversight, ideally, from the start. 

Leadership Siloes Persist

The survey reveals a growing divide between technical leaders and their business counterparts. Engineers and AI leaders are almost twice as likely to be pursuing multiple use cases, leading hybrid build-and-buy strategies, and pushing deployments forward. Yet these same leaders face the brunt of governance demands—often without the training or tools to fully manage the risks.

For CTOs, VPs, and engineering managers, the lesson is clear: technical execution must be matched with governance acumen. This means closer alignment with compliance teams, clear accountability structures, and built-in processes for the development of ethical AI.

Small Firms Pose Big Governance Risks

One of the survey’s most pressing findings is the governance vulnerability of small firms. These organizations are significantly less likely to monitor models, define governance roles, or stay current with emerging regulations. Only 14% reported familiarity with well-known standards, such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

In a world where even small players can deploy powerful AI systems, this presents systemic risk. Failures to mitigate bias, data leaks, or model degradation and misuse, among other factors, can cascade across the ecosystem. Larger enterprises must take a leadership role in uplifting the governance capacity of their vendors, partners, and affiliates. Industry-wide collaboration, tools, and templates can also help minimize issues.

As the survey results indicate, there's considerable room for improvement in AI governance. Enterprises are taking real regulatory and reputational risks in the name of getting ahead, but this is a mistake. The organizations that thrive won’t be those that simply deploy AI fast, but the ones that deploy it responsibly and at scale.

Here are four strategies enterprise leaders can adopt to ensure AI governance is a priority: 

1.) Make AI Governance a Key Leadership Initiative: AI governance should be a board-level concern. Assign dedicated leadership, establish cross-functional ownership, and link governance to business outcomes.

2.) Integrate Risk Management from the Start: Integrate monitoring tools for model drift, hallucination, and injection attacks directly into deployment pipelines.

3.) Require AI Training: Invest in AI training for your entire organization. Ensure that teams understand key frameworks, such as NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, and applicable local and industry-specific regulations that impact your business.

4.) Prepare for Setbacks: Develop incident response plans tailored to AI-specific risks—bias, misuse, data exposure, and adversarial attacks. The only guarantee is that there will be missteps along the way. Make sure you’re prepared to remediate quickly and effectively.

Organizations leading the way in AI adoption treat governance as a performance enabler, not a bottleneck. They implement monitoring, risk evaluation, and incident management into engineering workflows. They use automated checks to prevent flawed models from reaching production. They also prepare for inevitable failures with comprehensive contingency plans.

Most importantly, they embed governance across functions, from product and engineering to IT and compliance, ensuring that responsibility isn’t siloed. With clear roles, proactive training, and integrated observability, these organizations reduce risk and accelerate innovation in a way that is both safe and sustainable.