As AI becomes the central engine of enterprise productivity, security leaders are finally getting the green light and budget to secure it. But a quiet crisis is brewing in the boardroom. Many organizations know they need “AI governance” but don’t know what they actually want.
The CISO’s dilemma: You have the budget for AI, but does it meet your requirements?
As AI becomes the central engine of enterprise productivity, security leaders are finally getting the green light and budget to secure it. But a quiet crisis is brewing in the boardroom. Many organizations know they need “AI governance” but don’t know what they actually want.
Without a systematic way to evaluate the exploding market of AI Usage Control (AUC) solutions, teams risk “investing” in legacy tools that were never built in the days of agent workflows and shadow browser extensions.
To address this very issue, we have released a new RFP guide for evaluating AI usage control and AI governance solutions. This is more than just a checklist. It’s a technology framework designed to help security architects and CISOs move from vague “AI security” goals to concrete, measurable project criteria.
Stop fighting the proliferation of apps. Start managing interactions
Conventional wisdom says that to protect AI, you need to catalog every application your employees touch. This is a losing battle. The RFP guide advocates a counterintuitive change. AI security is not an “app” issue. It’s a matter of interaction.
Stay tuned to the app to stay up to date with over 500 new GPT-based tools released weekly. Focusing on the interaction (i.e., the moment a prompt is typed or a file is uploaded) gives you tool-independent control.
What’s in it for you: By using this RFP to request “interaction-level inspections,” you stop being a bottleneck to innovation and start becoming a guardian of your data, regardless of which “shadow AI” tools your marketing team discovers.
Why your current security stack doesn’t pass AI tests
Many vendors claim to “do AI security” as a checkbox feature within CASB or SSE. Our RFP guide can help you spot this marketing. Most legacy tools rely on network layer visibility, so they don’t know what’s happening inside browser-side panels or encrypted IDE plugins.
This guide challenges vendors to answer difficult questions such as:
Can you detect the use of AI in incognito mode? Does it support “AI native” browsers such as Atlas, Dia, Comet? Can you distinguish between corporate and personal identities within the same session?
Benefits for you: This structured approach prevents “feature wash” by forcing vendors to prove that they can operate at the point of interaction without the need for large endpoint agents or disruptive network changes.
Eight pillars of a mature AI governance project
The RFP template provides a technical evaluation system across eight critical domains to ensure the chosen solution is future-proof.
Section What we’re actually testing 1. AI discovery and coverage Visibility across browsers, SaaS, extensions, and IDEs. 2. Context Awareness Does the tool understand who is asking the questions and why? 3. Can Policy Governance PII be blocked and harmless summaries allowed? 4. Real-time Enforcement Stop leaks before the Enter key is pressed. 5. Auditability Provides a “compliance-ready” report to the board of directors. 6. Architectural Suitability Can you deploy in hours without network disruption? 7. Ensure deployment and management tools don’t burden your IT staff. 8. Enable autonomous, agent-driven workflows to future-proof your vendors.
Governance is not a policy document. It is enforceable and measurable control.
The purpose of this RFP is not just to collect data. That’s for scoring. This guide includes response formats that require more than just a “yes/no” answer from vendors. Rather, you should explain how to do it and provide references.
This level of structure takes the guesswork out of sourcing. Instead of a subjective “feeling” about a vendor, you can now compare score-based vendors on how they address real-world risks such as rapid injections and unmanaged BYOD environments.
Next step: Define your requirements before the market defines them
Take the lead with our RFP guide for evaluating AI usage control solutions. This helps standardize assessment, accelerate research, and ultimately enable secure AI deployments that scale with your business.
Download our RFP guide and template here to start building your AI governance framework today.
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