#349 From AI Governance to AI Enablement with Stijn Christiaens, Chief Data Citizen at Collibra

Data governance has been around long enough to develop playbooks, but AI governance is evolving in real time. Industry trends like LLMs, agents, and emerging “swarms” are changing what oversight even means, from data lineage to agent-to-agent provenance.

For working teams, the questions are immediate: who leads—legal, security, IT, data, or a new AI role? How do you set standards so engineers aren’t using a different tool for every task? What maturity framework should you measure against, and how often should you reassess as technology shifts? How do you help teams move fast without breaking trust?

Stijn is a data governance veteran and one of the leading thinkers in the space. He runs data strategy, data infrastructure, and product evangelism at the data and AI governance company Collibra. Since founding Collibra 18 years ago, Stijn has held several executive positions, including COO and CTO.

In the episode, Richie and Stijn explore AI governance failures and wins, risks from agents that can act on systems, creating visibility with an agent registry, how AI governance differs from data governance, ownership across legal, security, IT, and data teams, EU AI Act risk tiers, and much more.

Links Mentioned in the Show:

1. Collibra
2. Connect with Stijn
3. AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
4. Related Episode: The New Paradigm for Enterprise AI Governance with Blake Brannon, Chief Innovation Officer at OneTrust
5. Explore AI-Native Learning on DataCamp

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