Customer Success Playbook S3 E67 - Gayle Gorvett - AI Governance Essentials

Customer success. Hello everyone and welcome to the Customer Success Playbook podcast, where we bring you actionable insights for the customer success team of today and tomorrow. I'm your host, Kevin Metzker. Unfortunately, Roman is unable to join us this week, but we are thrilled to welcome Gail Vete to the show.

Gail's a seasoned global tech lawyer and fractional general counsel with deep expertise in SaaS, cross-border transactions and AI governance. She's helped companies expand into markets from China to Istanbul. And currently leads g Govett Consulting. Gail, welcome to the show.

Would you like to share a little bit more about your background? Thank you. Um, yes, I would. Before forming my company, I was an associate at a large law firm in New York, and I was in-house counsel at two public companies, um, in France, nal, which is an Altel spinoff, and Brinks, EMEA.

Where I was international corporate counsel for the BGS business division and responsible for EMEA and Asia Pacific. And now in addition to helping clients with their day-to-day, um, legal matters, I do quite a lot of AI governance work. Which is a very interesting area to be in. Yeah, and I'm, I'm super excited about that because that's really what the topic of today's show is.

It is kind of getting into what you're doing in AI governance and how it kind of applies. And, you know, we do look at this from a customer success perspective, but quite frankly, this is whole company type stuff, right? So how, how people are using AI and what's happening. And how the governance structures are coming in.

It's important to understand that information and how to structure a governance program within a company because you're. Working on your customer's data. You're working on protecting your company's data. This new AI scenario, this new AI workflow is something that we need to consider all of these, these priorities.

And so with that said, like I said, I'm super excited to kind of talk to you about this and I think you're working or you're working with a program for governance structure. Can you kind of get into that a little bit more? Yes, I've been a member of two, um, AI guardrails working groups with the Duke Center on Law and Technology for, I guess it's a little more than a year now. And, um, duke is actually in, you know, similar to a lot of big universities like Stanford and MIT.

Um, creating a lot of working groups in this area. They have five. Um, the, the two I'm working with are focused on two different user groups. One is end users of ai, you know, just the general population, and the other is users.

So lawyers that are either in law firms or in-house who would be using ai. And we've been focusing on producing, um, AI guardrails for those two user groups. In the working groups that I'm part of. Can you get into kind of how those guidelines are getting developed?

What, what can you get into around that? Yeah. Um, so Duke basically, you know, put out a call to have volunteers to anyone who was really interested in participating in, of course got a, a pretty, um, large response. Um, and a lot of.

The people who volunteered for the user group. Um, the working groups that I'm part of are, um, lawyers or people who work in, um, different, uh, nonprofit organizations. Some, some are professors, um, and they're interested in making sure that we have, um. Guidelines and, and, um, documentation for the general population and also especially for lawyers to help clients and other lawyers, um, to really provide ethical and compliance guardrails for ai, especially in the United States where we have a, a real lack of federal regulation in this space.

Uh, to make sure that people use ai, but that they have some ethical and governance guidelines to help them do that. Thank you for the background. And if we get into the, what's your number one SH tip, which, so first show always is about what's your number one tip for ensuring that we kind of like the foundational rule for ensuring you have those ethical guidelines in place. You know, I've been a, a technology for, uh, going on 26 years now, and, you know, I've been working with, um, companies in this space since, you know.

The beginning with like monster.com and, um, you know, the, the battle between, uh, Microsoft and um, and, and Google in the old days. And, um, and I, I think AI has a lot of promise. It's very innovating.

It's a kind of the, the shiny new toy right now. But I, I see a lot of the, the hype in this space as similar to what we saw when blockchain was. Everywhere about 10 years ago. And, and, um, people who are, you know, thinking about using this in a, in an enterprise context.

I would say two things. I would say yes. It, it definitely, it has a lot of promise. It, it shows a lot of, um, you know.

Um, innovation in terms of helping, uh, in, in a lot of administrative tasks, a lot of potential productivity tools. But think about the use case, the specific use case for your business, um, before, you know, potentially investing, uh, financial resources or making AI a really big part of your. Uh, you know, planning in, in any strategic way on a business level. Then when you think about AI and how to, um, look at a, a governance policy or an ethical, uh, use of ai, you always have to think about how you're using it.

Of course, think about your customers and how they want to be, um, informed of your use of ai. And then you have to approach it from a multidisciplinary way. Um, make sure that you are involving the business function, the the tech people in your team. If you do have in-house counsel involved, the them.

If you, if you're not big enough to do that, maybe think of someone you know, like me, who's a fractional, um, general counsel to help you. Um, come up with those kind of guidelines. You know, there are resources out there, um, to help you go go through this process and think about the considerations and the risk that you might be, uh, facing in your company, um, as you're going through that. So, one that I would recommend to people in the US is the nis NIST AI risk framework.

That's NIST. And the other one for legal teams is the one that we've developed through Duke, which is the, the Duke AI risk Framework, through which we've, we've developed, you know, a comprehensive, um, AI risk assessment, which allows legal teams to develop their own governance policies that are. Um, really app appropriate to their business, their industry, their sector, and the use case that they're using it for. Fantastic for, and thank you for helping kick off today.

I think we're gonna probably get into more detail on some of these in our show on Wednesday. Um, kind of what happens on when you go deep and who's responsible or accountable. When AI goes wrong, don't miss it. Like, share, subscribe, and until then, keep on playing.