When AI governance lands on privacy’s desk

Source Domain: iapp.org

Many privacy professionals are being asked to help lead artificial intelligence governance before their organizations have answered a more basic question: What part of AI governance actually belongs to privacy?

Some of the work is familiar. Anyone studying for the AI Governance Professional certification, sitting through AI governance training or reviewing a vendor’s responsible AI framework may recognize much of the underlying operating model. Risk assessment, data use analysis, vendor oversight, transparency, documentation, accountability, human review, escalation and evidence have long been part of privacy work.

The vocabulary is different. The acronyms are different. The technical context may be more complex. But the operational shape is not entirely new.

The harder issue is not whether privacy professionals have relevant knowledge. They do. The harder issue is knowing how to sort the work when AI governance arrives as one large, undifferentiated assignment.

In practice, the work tends to fall into four categories: what privacy professionals already know how to do, what privacy professionals need to learn, what belongs with another function, and what should be procured or supported externally.

When those categories are blurred together, AI governance can feel bigger, newer and more intimidating than it needs to be. That is often when privacy professionals start questioning their footing and reaching for another credential, another framework or another tool before recognizing the judgment they have already developed.

The practical frame I have come to use is what I call the “working partition: keep, learn, redirect, buy.” It is not meant to be fixed or universal. It is a way to locate the work before deciding how to approach it.

I tested an earlier version of this framing in a recent conversation on the “Let’s Talk Privacy” podcast with Aakash Suri. The response from privacy practitioners suggested it helped name something many people are already experiencing. AI…

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