6 Guidelines for Governing AI

Sravan Vadigepalli, an IEEE senior member and technology executive at Lowe's who leads enterprise AI strategy, AI products and partnerships, has published six guidelines for governing AI systems, drawn from his experience in product management and data analytics and his work scaling analytics teams at Best Buy and Target. He is a coauthor of The Enterprise Brain: Rewiring Your Business for the AI-Native Era.

Vadigepalli describes a shift he calls the "governor shift," from executing tasks personally to setting the intent, principles and boundaries for systems that execute them. The work, he writes, now includes defining which decisions AI systems can make autonomously, when they must escalate to a person, and which actions remain off-limits.

He cites a 2025 report from MIT Media Lab's Project NANDA, which found that despite an estimated US $30 billion to $40 billion in enterprise generative-AI investment, the vast majority of organizations in its dataset had not yet demonstrated measurable profit-and-loss impact. The report estimated that only about 5 percent of integrated pilots were generating substantial value. Researchers named the pattern the GenAI Divide.

The six guidelines are: recognize when you have become "human middleware"; trade rules for principles; write your culture into your code; install a trust thermostat, not a trust switch; fix context before you govern; and learn to lead by exception.

Vadigepalli writes that governance should be expressed as machine-readable instructions in three layers: a constitution of rules an agent may never break, a doctrine covering business trade-offs, and a playbook of task tactics. He proposes a confidence-score threshold above which an agent proceeds alone and below which a human decides, with that answer fed back into a learning loop. He describes a full loop as Connections, Context, Reasoning, Actions and Governance, or CCRAG.

He also addresses what he calls the identity question, writing that AI has made judgment the scarcest resource in organizations and that taste determines which defensible options to offer a customer.