AI Governance as Code: An Introduction to AIGovOps
NewAI governance is no longer optional. Like privacy and security before it, governance is quickly becoming a production requirement, enforced through regulation, audits, and fines—often after real harm has already occurred. Ken Johnston and Bob Rapp, founders of the AiGovOps Foundation, introduce AIGovOps: the practice of implementing AI Governance as Code, embedded directly into delivery pipelines and operational workflows. This hands-on session begins with a concise review of Responsible AI and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, followed by an interactive HARMS workshop using real AI incidents to identify where governance failures turn into user harm, reputational damage, and regulatory exposure. From there, the focus shifts to execution. Participants will learn how modern teams automate governance using guardrails, observability, human-in-the-loop controls, and escalation paths—governing AI at the speed of DevOps, not through slow, manual reviews. This tutorial is not about building models. It’s about running AI in production without shipping harm—or fines. Attendees will leave with a practical mental model for AIGovOps and concrete patterns they can apply immediately in real-world AI systems.
Ken Johnston is a Founder of the AiGovOps Foundation, a nonprofit practitioner community advancing AI Governance as Code — the discipline of embedding governance controls into AI systems through engineering rigor, automation, and operational feedback loops rather than policy documents and good intentions. With over 30 years of engineering and data leadership, Ken brings rare depth across the full stack of responsible AI deployment: software quality, cloud platforms, telemetry, observability, and applied AI at scale. As a former GM and Principal Data Science Manager at Microsoft, he helped build foundational systems for A/B experimentation, product telemetry, and the M360 Business Intelligence Graph. He went on to serve as VP of Cloud Platforms and Telematics at Ford and CEO of Autonomic.ai, where he led scalable data-driven innovations in connected vehicle technology. Ken is coauthor of How We Test Software at Microsoft. His upcoming book, The Lean AI Handbook, Pierson summer 2026, captures best practices for operationalizing AI at scale. He currently serves as Advisor and VP of AI at Envorso, helping enterprise clients architect responsible, scalable AI solutions that drive measurable impact.
Bob Rapp is a data scientist who began his journey in the 1980s with VR - both military and civilian. Bob has held positions at IBM (Watson) as a VP, at MIcrosoft in industry verticals with very large data sets (including telecommunications, automotive, and finance), and at GE Healthcare where he was involved in shipping the first ML models to find certain kinds of cancer. Today, Bob continues to blaze trails within AI/ML with professional curation at GM in the AI Center of Excellence.