How can enterprises achieve AI governance? Collibra offers new solution

By now, most businesses in the world have realized that generative AI is here to stay and they should be using it in at least some capacity for their operations. But how do so in a way that is safe, secure, and achieves “AI governance,” the term given to tracking AI deployment and data usage within an organization?

Collibra, the data governance firm headquartered in New York City and Brussels, Belgium is introducing a new solution tailored specifically to solve this problem.

“The consensus that AI is becoming such a focus for almost every organization, but also every organization understands that they need to do AI in the right way,” said Collibra co-founder and CEO Felix Van de Maele, in an exclusive video call interview with VentureBeat.

Announced today, the new product, Collibra AI Governance, is poised to redefine how organizations implement AI by ensuring safety, efficiency, and trustworthiness in their deployments.

Bridging the gap between organizational technology and policy

Developed as an integral component of the Collibra Data Intelligence Platform, it’s designed to bridge the crucial gap between data, AI, and legal compliance.

It empowers teams across these domains to collaborate effectively, ensuring AI projects align with legal and privacy mandates, minimize data risks, and enhance model performance and return on investment (ROI), thereby accelerating the journey from concept to production.

It also does so by assisting organizations across the entirety of their AI adoption journey along every step of the way, from “ideation to trading to model development, to actually putting it in production and continuously monitoring it,” Van de Maele told VentureBeat. “It’s all about ‘how do you support that entire AI use case across an entire lifecycle?’”

This applies not just to one AI solution or platform, but all the ways AI is being used at any given roganization.

Collibra AI Governance distinguishes itself by offering intuitive management and monitoring of AI projects, ensuring sensitive data protection, and fostering greater transparency and understanding of AI use cases.

“The biggest challenge is ensuring true visibility across the whole organization about who’s doing what and how exactly,” Van de Maele said. “It’s more than documentation. It’s also the workflow…to ensure that things are done in the right way.”

It achieves this by sitting atop and integrating with existing Collibra data management offerings for customers, including the Collibra Data Catalog, Collibra Data Quality & Observability, Collibra Data Privacy, and Collibra Protect.

A new approach to risk management and mitigation

The imperative for robust AI governance is underscored by findings from a recent IDC survey, which revealed that while 71% of companies are already harnessing AI, the pathway to its successful implementation is fraught with potential pitfalls.

From model bias and inaccuracies to legal and ethical conundrums, the challenges are many, posing significant risks to an organization’s reputation and financial health. Just take a look at how Google’s reputation and even its stock valuation have suffered in the days since users began criticizing its Gemini AI model for producing racially confused imagery and philosophically bizarre responses.

Collibra’s AI Governance solution is meticulously crafted to mitigate these risks by providing a comprehensive framework for AI governance.

This includes streamlined compliance processes, risk mitigation strategies, and mechanisms to enhance model performance and ROI. By enabling a unified platform for governing both AI and the underlying data, Collibra aims to dispel the concerns surrounding AI adoption.

And all of this is included as an “add-on” module to Collibra’s existing Data Intelligence Platform.

Laura Sellers, Collibra’s chief product officer, provided a statement in a press release that emphasized the product’s value proposition, noting the prevalent organizational desire to prioritize AI amidst concerns over its unpredictability and the potential for adverse outcomes.

“With Collibra AI Governance, we’re helping to eliminate the concerns of CIOs, CDOs, data leaders, and legal teams by providing a unified platform to govern AI and the data that drives it with automated workflows, processes, and policies to deliver trusted AI across the organization,” Sellers stated.

Endorsements from key figures in the wider enterprise software world

Industry leaders are further validating and endorsing Collibra’s new offering. Dan Yu, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Solutions, Data and Analytics at SAP SE, lauded Collibra AI Governance for its potential to ensure the ethical and responsible use of AI across organizations.

As Collibra AI Governance is set to be showcased at the upcoming Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, Florida, from March 11-13, 2024.

By addressing the complex challenges that come with AI projects, Collibra is not just offering a product but a promise of AI that is both powerful and principled.