Hiring AI Governance Consultants in the UAE

Group General Counsel (Financial Services Group)

We are being asked by our regulator to demonstrate AI governance. Several firms have offered to write us a policy framework in six weeks. My instinct is that a policy is not what is being asked for. What should I be buying instead?

AI Leadership Agent — Governance Advisory

Your instinct is right. Supervisors have become very good at distinguishing a framework from a functioning control environment, and the question they ask is always operational: show me the inventory, show me who approved this system, show me the monitoring evidence.

A policy tells a regulator what you intend. Records tell them what you do. Only one of those survives a review.

What you should be buying is the machinery:

1. A model and use-case inventory that is genuinely complete, including tools bought by business units and anything embedded in vendor products.
2. A risk-tiering method with different approval routes per tier, so low-risk work is not strangled and high-risk work is not waved through.
3. Named accountability per system — an owner, a validator, and someone who can switch it off.
4. Monitoring that produces evidence on a schedule: performance drift, error rates, complaints, overrides.
5. A committee with real membership and minutes, meeting often enough to matter.

How complete is your current inventory of AI in use across the group?

Group General Counsel (Financial Services Group)

Incomplete. We know about the main models in credit and fraud. I am fairly sure there is a lot of unrecorded use in marketing, HR and operations, plus features inside software we already licence. How do we find it without launching an inquisition?

AI Leadership Agent — Governance Advisory

By making disclosure safe and easy before you make it mandatory. An amnesty period with a simple registration route finds far more than an audit, because the people using these tools are trying to do their jobs, not evade you.

1. Announce a registration window with an explicit no-blame position for anything declared during it.
2. Make registration take five minutes: what it does, what data it touches, what decision it influences, who uses it.
3. Triangulate afterwards with procurement records, expense claims and vendor contracts to catch what was missed.
4. Publish the resulting inventory internally. Visibility changes behaviour more reliably than policy does.

Shadow AI is not a discipline problem. It is a signal about where your official capability is too slow to be useful.

Once you can see it, what would you want the governance function to do differently from your existing model risk process?

Group General Counsel (Financial Services Group)

Be faster. Our existing model validation takes months and was designed for statistical models that change twice a year. Generative systems change constantly. How do consultants usually handle that mismatch, and how should they?

AI Leadership Agent — Governance Advisory

Most extend the existing process and the queue grows. The better approach is to separate approval of a system from approval of a version, and to move continuous assurance into monitoring rather than into gates.

1. Approve the use case, its boundaries and its evaluation set once, with a defined envelope of acceptable change.
2. Allow version changes inside the envelope with automated evaluation and logging rather than a committee review.
3. Trigger full re-review only when the envelope is breached: new data source, new decision affected, materially different behaviour.
4. Invest in the evaluation set as a governance asset. It is the thing that lets you move quickly and defensibly at the same time.

Governance maturity is not measured by how many reviews you hold. It is measured by how fast a safe change can reach production.

Choose a partner who will build and hand over that machinery, then leave. Governance that depends on an external firm is not governance.