A security questionnaire lands from a prospect’s procurement team, and the deal that was supposed to close this quarter quietly stalls. Or a board member asks who owns AI risk at the company, and the honest answer is nobody, exactly. Security and compliance gaps rarely announce themselves as crises. They show up as business friction: slower deals, longer procurement cycles, uncomfortable diligence questions and a growing list of things leadership knows should have been addressed sooner.
AI governance is also moving from a future consideration to a current operating requirement. From 2 August 2026, the European Commission’s AI Office and national authorities began enforcing applicable provisions of the EU AI Act, including new transparency requirements. Requirements for certain high-risk systems continue to phase in later. The European Commission provides the current enforcement timeline.
The instinct is often to hire a full-time CISO, buy a compliance platform or assign an engineer to complete a SOC 2 checklist. But security and enterprise readiness rarely fail because nobody is working hard enough. They fail because no single person owns the program, connects the work across functions and translates technical controls into evidence a customer, auditor, board or regulator can understand.
The short answer: most growing companies do not immediately need an entire security department. They need an operator with enough seniority and credibility to own the mandate. That may be a vCISO, Interim CISO, GRC Lead, Security Program Lead or AI Governance Lead.