Holistic AI was one of the first companies built specifically to govern, audit, and red team AI systems. As co-founder and co-CEO Emre Kazim explains, its original thesis was that AI governance would mirror data governance: a compliance-driven regime. He now believes the better analogy is cybersecurity: a more technical, incident-driven discipline where best practices emerge from real-world events and propagate across industry, rather than descending from abstract regulatory frameworks. Kazim argues this shift has significant implications for who owns AI governance inside enterprises, what skills they need, and why documentation-and-reporting vendors are unlikely to capture the core of the market.

Kazim also makes the case that human-in-the-loop oversight, long treated as the default answer to AI risk, has become untenable as systems grow more dynamic and agentic. He distinguishes between two enterprise adoption patterns: a democratic model in which every employee has a copilot, and a vanguard model in which a small number of mission-critical agentic systems drive most of the value and demand most of the governance attention. Finally, he argues that meaningful research capacity will be the price of entry for AI governance firms going forward.

Dr. Emre Kazim is the co-founder and co-CEO of Holistic AI, an AI governance platform company spun out of University College London in 2020. He previously served as a Research Fellow in UCL's Department of Computer Science. Kazim has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles on AI ethics and governance, serves as a member of the OECD's Network of Experts on AI, and is involved with the NIST AI Safety Institute.

Towards Algorithm Auditing (Royal Society Open Science, 2024)

What is AI Governance? (Holistic Blog, February 2026)