A CISO walks into the AI rollout meeting with a list of questions. They are usually the same questions, and the quality of the answers tells you whether the project is going to ship or get stuck in review.
Question one. Where is our data going? The right answer includes the names of specific cloud regions, the specific models being called, whether prompts are being logged for training, and the contractual terms with the vendor. Vague answers here are why projects stall.
Question two. Who has access to what? AI tools have a habit of exploding access. A search tool that reads from the whole document store is a search tool that potentially returns documents to users who should not see them. Access control needs to propagate all the way through the retrieval layer, not just the UI layer.
Question three. What happens if the model is wrong and somebody acts on it? This is the accountability question. It needs a human-in-the-loop design for anything material. It needs audit logs of every AI-generated decision. It needs a rollback mechanism for agent actions. "The AI made a mistake" is not a defensible answer in a regulated environment, or in a customer dispute, or in a board-level incident review.
Question four. Can we turn it off? Vendor dependency is a risk. If a model provider goes down, changes terms, or starts charging 10x overnight, can the business keep running? The answer should include how quickly you can swap models, what data you control, and whether any business process has become dependent on a single vendor in a way that would be hard to unwind.
Question five. How do we know it is working? Evaluation is the part of AI that gets done last and matters most. Every deployed model should have a metric, a dashboard, and a review cadence. If the accuracy drops, the right people should know within a day, not a quarter.
If you walk into an enterprise AI meeting with good answers to these five questions, the CISO becomes a supporter, not a blocker. If you walk in with vague answers, the project dies in review. We have learned to treat governance as a day-one design constraint, not a day-90 compliance audit. The difference shows up in whether the project gets to production at all.