From MVP to MVF: Governing AI Agents with Guardrails, Policy-as-Code, and Board Oversight with Aravind Parthasarathy

About this episode

Tom Fox discusses AI governance and compliance with Aravind Parthasarathy, focusing on the transition from AI as a tool to an operator.

Innovation occurs across many areas, and compliance professionals need not only to be ready for it but also to embrace it. Join Tom Fox, the Voice of Compliance, as he visits with top innovative minds, thinkers, and creators in the award-winning Innovation in Compliance podcast. In this episode, host Tom visits with Aravind Parthasarathy, Vice President, Client Partner for Telco & Tech at NewRocket, a ServiceNow implementation company focused on helping large enterprises adopt agentic AI. They discuss the shift from viewing AI as a tool to treating it as an operator with humans as mentors handling exceptions, and what this means for compliance, GRC, and risk management. Aravind contrasts minimum viable product (MVP) with minimum viable function (MVF), emphasizing end-to-end autonomous business functions, probabilistic performance, and continuous learning. They cover governance needs, including guardrails, policy-as-code, auditability of agent decisions, model drift monitoring, and automated “trust but verify.” Aravind provides a telecom outage-troubleshooting example with compliance notification obligations, addresses board-level AI governance using emerging standards like ISO…

People in this episode

Host: Tom Fox

Guest: Aravind Parthasarathy

Topics covered

• AI governance
• compliance
• risk management
• agentic AI
• minimum viable function
• policy-as-code
• board oversight

Keywords

• AI
• compliance
• governance
• risk management
• minimum viable function
• policy-as-code
• auditability
• trust but verify
• context graphs

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NewRocket, ServiceNow, ISO 42001

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