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AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leadership

AI and data executive with 25 years leading modernization where strategy, governance, and delivery meet. Most recently I ran the AI practice inside Perficient's AI & Data Platforms service line: defined its offerings and points of view, led pursuits from the first executive conversation to the finalist table, and delivered as senior architect for Fortune 500 clients in financial services, healthcare, energy and utilities, automotive, retail, and technology.

Shaped by enterprise, government, nonprofit, and startup work alike. I move organizations from AI pilots to governed, production-grade programs, and I carry the legal, business, and engineering vocabulary to do it in one room. AI should augment—not overwhelm; governance should enable—not constrain.

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Scott Gallant - AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leader

Today's Take

Today's thoughts worth preserving...

OpenAI's agent monitoring only works if someone can pull the brake

OpenAI describes layered monitoring for frontier model misalignment and unauthorized agent behavior, built so responders can intervene before incidents escalate. The part I'd underline is the word responders. Detection is the easy half to fund. Running privacy programs taught me that a breach-notification clock doesn't care how good your alerting is if nobody knows who owns the call at 2 a.m. Most enterprises piloting agents have logs and maybe a dashboard. Far fewer have named people with authority to pause an agent mid-task. If your agent did something unauthorized this afternoon, who would stop it, and how fast?

Read the article: How we detect frontier model misalignment (OpenAI)
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Sectors

Where the work has taken me

Core Expertise

Forward-leaning evangelism, backed by continuing to apply and build in the trenches

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    AI Strategy & Governance

    Executive-level AI strategy, readiness assessments, and governance frameworks that take organizations from pilots to governed, production-grade programs. Most recently built and ran the AI practice inside Perficient's AI & Data Platforms service line, delivering this daily to Fortune 500 clients in financial services, healthcare, energy and utilities, automotive, retail, and technology.

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    Evaluation, Testing & Data Readiness

    The discipline between a demo and a deployment: model evaluation and testing on your data and against your risks, and the data foundations that make AI trustworthy in the first place.

  • 🛡️

    Responsible AI & Frontier-Model Security

    Points of view on what the newest class of models can do, which capabilities belong in front of which data, and the internal approval processes to match. Served on a firm-wide AI technology approval committee and authored its asset and accelerator classification framework.

  • 🔒

    Privacy, Risk & Compliance Engineering

    Helped operationalize Nike's GDPR program; privacy director work for Pearson; active control mappings across GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA/CPRA, ISO, NIST, FedRAMP, FERPA, COPPA, and PCI, built into the design rather than bolted on.

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    Practice, Pursuit & Partner Leadership

    Owning a practice's offerings and points of view; leading pursuits from the first executive conversation through the finalist table; enabling sellers and Microsoft, AWS, Google, Salesforce, and Adobe partner teams; leading and developing people.

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    Building in the Trenches

    Through Keyed Systems I still design and ship governance, identity, and AI-enabled platforms, and I've launched a sovereign government's national health platform under emergency conditions. Strategy from someone who deploys survives contact with production.

Perspectives

How I think about AI governance, evaluation, and transformation

"Most organizations can demo AI. Far fewer can explain who approved the model, what it was evaluated against, where its data came from, and what happens when it's wrong.

Pilots aren't the hard part—governed production is. The practice is closing that gap without slowing the business down. Governance should enable, not constrain."

Scott Gallant
AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leader

"If you can't measure a model's behavior on your own data and against your own risks, you don't have a deployment decision. You have a hope.

Testing and evaluation belong in the program from the first workshop, not the last sprint."

Scott Gallant
AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leader

"The newest class of models changes what an attacker can do and what an insider can leak. That isn't a tooling question for the security team alone.

It's an executive question about which capabilities the organization is willing to put in front of which data—and it deserves a point of view before the first pilot, not after the first incident."

Scott Gallant
AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leader

"Digital transformation isn't just about implementing new technologies—it's about fundamentally reimagining how your organization creates and delivers value. True transformation requires aligning people, processes, and technology with strategic vision.

The organizations that thrive don't just digitize existing processes; they rethink their operating model. That is as true for a state agency or a school system as it is for a Fortune 500 enterprise."

Scott Gallant
AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leader

"The ones and zeros have become the easy part. Engineering and delivery teams are moving faster than we've ever seen, and the gains are real.

What that speed exposes is everything around it: culture, process, and people now have to scale at the same rate as the code. The organizations that win treat change and enablement as the program, not the afterthought—supporting the people who have to absorb the change, redesigning the processes that were built for a slower pace, and measuring adoption with the same rigor as throughput."

Scott Gallant
AI Governance & Strategy Practice Leader

Let's Connect

Hiring for AI, data, or governance leadership, or standing up an AI program that needs to survive contact with production? Let's talk. Director or VP practice leadership, or the in-house equivalent owning enterprise AI strategy and governance.

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