AI governance bottleneck? Or your biggest opportunity?
Believe it or not, lawyers are your best friend.
Every AI initiative at your company now runs through the legal team before it can launch.
AI governance is a huge bottleneck right now. Every business unit is waiting on the legal team's approval before they can ship their next AI feature. Every data scientist needs sign-off before deploying a new model. Every product manager is stuck until legal says yes.
But here's what that actually means for the lawyers: you've become essential to your company's competitive advantage. Lawyers, privacy personnel, and AI leads aren't just managing compliance anymore. They are the gatekeepers for innovation itself.
This is actually a rare position to be in. Do you have the infrastructure to make the most of it? Because right now, most teams are drowning in Gmail threads, spreadsheets, Slack channels, and Zoom calls trying to cobble together a review process. Everyone ends up with information scattered across siloed tools, making it nearly impossible to scale. But here's the opportunity: if you can get ahead of this, you become the team that accelerates innovation rather than slowing it down. You become strategic partners, not bottlenecks.
It may seem overwhelming, but you don’t have to solve everything at once. Start practical. Pick two or three pain points in your current process, the things that actually hurt and slow you down, and solve those first. Then bring in more stakeholders as you build momentum. If you can get this part right, you can position yourself strategically to scale adoption, while your competitors struggle with siloed systems.
This isn't just about efficiency. It's about positioning your team as enablers of responsible innovation.
You can listen to the whole IAPP podcast episode here.
