Start AI Governance With the Outcome, or Waste the Spend

Episode Summary

Yogita Parulekar founded Invi Grid because she was tired of the conversation where a security team tells a CIO what is already broken. Her argument here is that AI governance is not a new discipline invented for AI. It is corporate governance principles applied to AI, and she walks them in order: objectives and goals first, then structure and leadership and culture, then the risks to those objectives, then strategy, evaluation, and only then the technical and operational controls. Security sits inside that, not beside it, because security and privacy are risks to the objectives. Her sharpest point is what happens when the first step is skipped: if you do not know what outcomes you want, the time, effort and money are just waste. She says that is the single most common mistake she sees, and she names explainability as the word she would put at the center of the culture.

Key takeaways

  • She founded the company to get out of a conversation she had stopped believing in. She was tired of going to CIOs and CTOs and telling them all the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities they needed to fix, she says, because it is never a happy conversation to have and it was not moving the needle on cybersecurity. Her answer was first principles and design thinking: build a product that makes secure by design, and governance by design, easy to do

  • The layering she insists on is governance over security, not governance beside it. Asked about securing AI she splits the answer in two, the overarching governance layer and the security layer within it, and hands the choice of which to take first to Christina, who picks governance. She returns to the ordering four minutes later to say why she likes it: security and privacy are the risks you deal with in order to make sure your objectives and goals are met

  • Her reason for defining the term at all is that she thinks it has been ruined. AI governance is a very misused and abused term and very less understood, she says, and it relates beautifully to corporate objectives and goals on one hand and security goals and objectives on the other. It is, in her phrase, what ties everything together

  • The definition she gives is deliberately unoriginal, and that is the point. AI governance is about applying governance principles to AI, she says, and corporate governance is already pretty well defined: objectives and goals clearly laid out, a structure with leadership and culture articulated so those goals can be met, managing the risks to them, a strategy for achieving them, continuous performance evaluation, and the technical and operational controls for the same

  • Applied to AI, the first principle is the one she says gets skipped. What are we trying to achieve with AI, and what outcomes do we expect, whether the solution is internal or external facing. If we do not know what the outcomes are, she says, all the time, effort and money we spend on it are just a waste, and we will get nowhere

  • The second principle is structure, and for AI it starts with knowing which AI you mean. Traditional AI, the generative AI people talk about today, or agentic AI, and what you want to achieve with it. Starting with an understanding of what AI can and cannot do is critical, she says, including which AI and machine learning solutions are deterministic and which are not

  • She names three kinds of risk and then adds two more. Algorithmic risk is which models you choose. Data risk is which data sources you use, and whether you are ready for the data. Output risk is whether the outputs can hallucinate. To those she adds scheming and adversarial attacks. Understanding those risks to achieving your objectives is, she says, the third layer

  • Her account of how clients actually arrive is that the governance work is usually already behind them. It is a mix of both, she says, but often they come to Invi Grid after the decisions are made, asking how to implement what they have faster, better, cheaper and secure because they have compliance requirements to meet. Sometimes her team has to take a step back and make them reconsider decisions they should have thought about earlier, which she describes as going a little beyond scope

  • The single most common mistake she sees is not a technical one. It is not thinking through what outputs and outcomes they exactly need out of that AI, why they are building it, and why they chose that specific approach. She calls that the number one single common mistake, and one that keeps occurring again and again

  • The second most common mistake follows from getting the first one right. Having chosen the right things to transform and augment with AI, the next thing she sees is not having thought through very clearly on the security and governance side

  • Her account of why adoption stalls starts with what employees are feeling, not with the technology. Everybody in the company is asking how AI is going to help them, she says, and on the other hand there is a lot of anxiety and a fear that partaking in it will take their job away. Add hallucinations and the mix gets difficult

  • She gives two failure modes that drop engagement fast, and one of them is not accuracy. If a user sees wrong output, and especially on a customer-facing system, that is a bigger problem, and if the output is wrong all the time the engagement drops very quickly. The second is latency: she compares it to the early days of telephone support, where the line would not understand you and the customer got irritated enough to ask for a human

  • Her answer to both is the governance layer again, addressed upfront rather than after the complaint. Make it very clear what you are trying to achieve with AI, to the internal audience as much as the external one, and build a culture of transparency by design, documenting everything, and trust by design

  • The word she singles out is explainability, and she wants it visible rather than documented. Explainability of your AI is, in her words, the more important word she likes: what is it doing, why is it doing it, how is it doing it. She suggests showing the model working through its response on screen as it goes, and says baking that into the culture of the AI team is absolutely critical for overcoming resistance, anxiety and fear

  • For an executive early in the journey she describes the squeeze rather than the answer first. Boards are themselves being asked whether the company is doing AI, she says, and are pushing it down to CEOs and CIOs, who are hearing a lot about when the benefits show up in cost reduction, process improvement, customer-facing work or investment. If you have not started already, she says, you are late

  • Her caution is that answering that pressure badly is worse than being late. If you have jumped in by just asking how high, because you were told to, without thinking it through, you may be burning a lot of time, money and effort without any real results to show

  • Her actual starting instruction is homework, and it is about telling the kinds of AI apart. Start by learning more about AI, GenAI and machine learning, she says, and work out whether traditional AI is enough or you need generative AI and when you would use it. Then look for four signals that it might help: a need for creativity, a need for personalization, a need for a lot of data crunching, and a need to remove the mundane where the mundane requires expertise and is therefore error-prone

  • Asked for her leadership edge, she answers with a tension rather than a strength. Understanding what she needs to do to stay competitive in this mad race for AI and AI everywhere, and balancing that against what will actually make money

About Yogita Parulekar

Yogita Parulekar is founder and CEO of Invi Grid Inc., a secure-by-design cloud and AI infrastructure company whose goal, as she puts it, is day zero security and compliance for its customers. She brings more than twenty years of cybersecurity, cloud architecture and digital transformation experience, and advises Fortune 500 leaders on adopting AI with governance and compliance built in from the start. She founded the company out of frustration with reactive security: she was tired of telling CIOs and CTOs what was already broken, and wanted to build something that made secure by design, and governance by design, easy to do. This is her first appearance on AI Realized. She returns on episode 44, where the subject is what an agent is permitted to do rather than how governance is structured, and the two conversations are worth reading in order.

 

In this episode

00:42 Welcome
01:16 What Invi Grid does, and her role
01:25 Secure by design, and day zero security and compliance
01:45 Why she founded it: the conversation she was tired of having
02:30 Securing AI in the cloud
02:45 Two layers: governance overarching, security within it
03:10 A misused and abused term, and why she starts there
03:31 AI governance is applying governance principles to AI
04:17 Risks, strategy, evaluation, and the controls last
04:45 Principle one: objectives and goals for the AI
05:09 Principle two: structure, leadership and culture
05:54 Principle three: algorithmic, data and output risk
06:45 Where security and operational risk enter
07:19 Do clients build these layers before you arrive
07:34 They usually arrive after the decisions are made
08:20 The common mistakes leadership teams make
08:31 Mistake one: not knowing the outputs and outcomes
08:50 Mistake two: security and governance not thought through
09:15 What the roundtable heard about outputs and agents
10:08 Where AI can actually transform and augment a process
10:17 Anxiety, and the fear of losing a job to it
10:43 Wrong output, and how fast engagement drops
11:04 Slow response, and the early days of telephone support
11:28 Coming back to governance, and addressing it upfront
12:29 Explainability, and showing the reasoning on screen
13:20 Guidance for executives early in the journey
13:43 Boards being asked whether the company is doing AI
14:12 Late is bad, but jumping without thinking is worse
14:40 Learning the kinds of AI, and four signals for where it helps
15:45 Resources she offers to send afterwards
16:20 Staying competitive, against what actually makes money
16:40 Wrap-up

In Yogita’s words

“AI governance is about applying governance principles to AI”

— Yogita Parulekar   (03:31)

“If we don’t know what the outcomes are, all the time, effort, money that we will spend on it are just a waste. We will get nowhere, right? So starting with the objectives is always very crucial.”

— Yogita Parulekar   (04:45)

“The most common mistake is not thinking through what exactly, what are the outputs and outcomes they exactly need out of that AI, and why are they building it, and why that specific approach they have used.”

— Yogita Parulekar   (08:31)

“Explainability, I think the more important word that I like is explainability of your AI. What is it doing? Why is it doing? How is it doing?”

— Yogita Parulekar   (12:29)

“That is why I like to first talk about governance and then move into security and, because this is how it’s tied together.”

— Yogita Parulekar   (06:45)

“I was tired of going to the CIOs and the CTOs and telling them all the misconfigurations and vulnerabilities that they need to fix. It’s never a happy conversation to have, and I just wanted to change the game.”

— Yogita Parulekar   (01:45)

“If you haven’t started already, you’re, you’re late. But on the other hand, if you have jumped in without, by just asking how high, because you’ve been asked to do it wi- without thinking through it, you may be burning a lot of time and money and effort without really, wi- without any real results to show.”

— Yogita Parulekar   (14:12)

“Understanding what I need to do to stay competitive in this mad race for AI and AI everywhere, and balancing that out with what will actually make money.”

— Yogita Parulekar   (16:20)

 

Resources

Yogita Parulekar

  • Yogita Parulekar on LinkedIn: Her profile, where she writes about secure-by-design cloud and AI deployment

  • Invi Grid: The secure-by-design cloud and AI infrastructure company she founded and runs. Its goal, as she describes it, is day zero security and compliance for its customers

Ideas and terms discussed

  • AI governance as applied corporate governance: Her definition, and the spine of the episode. AI governance is applying governance principles to AI, and those principles are the ones corporate governance already has: objectives and goals clearly laid out, a structure with leadership and culture articulated so the goals can be met, management of the risks to them, a strategy, continuous performance evaluation, and the technical and operational controls for the same. She gives them in that order deliberately, with the controls last

  • Governance over security, not beside it: Her structural claim, and the reason she takes the two questions in the order she does. The governance layer is overarching and the security layer sits within it, because security and privacy are risks to achieving the objectives rather than a separate program of their own. It is also why she says the term ties everything together: corporate objectives on one side, security objectives on the other

  • The risks she names: How she breaks the risk principle down for AI. Algorithmic risk is which models you choose. Data risk is which data sources you use and whether you are ready for the data. Output risk is whether the outputs can hallucinate. To those she adds scheming and adversarial attacks. Each is framed as a risk to achieving the objectives rather than as a risk in the abstract

  • Explainability, shown rather than filed: The word she singles out. Not just what the AI is doing but why and how, and visible while it happens: she suggests showing the model working through its response on screen as it goes. She puts it alongside transparency by design and trust by design as the three things to bake into the culture of the AI team

  • Secure by design, and day zero: The idea her company is built on, and the alternative to the conversation she left behind. Rather than auditing a deployment and reporting misconfigurations afterwards, security and compliance start at day zero, which she extends to governance by design

  • Four signals that AI might help: Her homework for an executive who has not started. A need for creativity, a need for personalization, a need for a lot of data crunching, or a need to remove the mundane where the mundane requires expertise and is therefore error-prone. She pairs them with the question of whether traditional AI is enough or generative AI is actually required

Named on air

  • The AI Realized executive roundtables: Christina brings one of them into the conversation, a roundtable on the economics of AI where the same point came up, that you need to know what outputs you are looking for in order to measure them. Christina adds the agent version of it, that beginning with the output before building the agent helps, and that the outcome has to be motivating enough for people to go through the change, such as relieving toil or connecting systems that are not connected today

Since this conversation

  • Invi Grid completes Google’s ISV Startup Springboard program: Company news dated 3 November 2025, two and a half months after this recording. The program is Google Cloud’s accelerator for independent software vendors, and the announcement is framed around the same secure-by-design deployment she describes here

 

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