#349 From AI Governance to AI Enablement with Stijn Christiaens, Chief Data Citizen at Collibra

About this episode

Stijn Christiaens discusses the evolving landscape of AI governance and its implications for data strategy and team collaboration.

Data governance has been around long enough to develop playbooks, but AI governance is evolving in real time. Industry trends like LLMs, agents, and emerging “swarms” are changing what oversight even means, from data lineage to agent-to-agent provenance. For working teams, the questions are immediate: who leads—legal, security, IT, data, or a new AI role? How do you set standards so engineers aren’t using a different tool for every task? What maturity framework should you measure against, and how often should you reassess as technology shifts? How do you help teams move fast without breaking trust? Stijn is a data governance veteran and one of the leading thinkers in the space. He runs data strategy, data infrastructure, and product evangelism at the data and AI governance company Collibra. Since founding Collibra 18 years ago, Stijn has held several executive positions, including COO and CTO. In the episode, Richie and Stijn explore AI governance failures and wins, risks from agents that can act on systems, creating visibility with an agent registry, how AI governance differs from data governance, ownership across legal, security, IT, and data teams, EU AI Act risk tiers, and…

People in this episode

Host: Richie

Guest: Stijn Christiaens

Topics covered

• AI governance
• data governance
• data strategy
• technology trends
• risk management
• team collaboration

Keywords

• AI governance
• data governance
• Collibra
• data strategy
• technology trends
• risk management
• team collaboration
• EU AI Act
• agent registry

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Collibra, EU AI Act, DataCamp

Products: AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work

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