Var Shankar: AI Governance for Smaller Organizations
From The Road to Accountable AI by Kevin Werbach
May 7, 2026 · 29 min · Season 5 · Episode 9
About this episode
Var Shankar discusses the need for AI governance resources tailored for smaller organizations and the importance of workforce literacy.
Var Shankar makes the case that most AI governance guidance is built for large, sophisticated, multifunctional global enterprises — and that this leaves out the roughly half of American workers employed at organizations with fewer than 500 people. Through the Council on AI Governance, the nonprofit he leads with Alexis Cook, he is trying to fill that gap with open, current, and pragmatic resources, including an AI Governance Playbook organized around four focus areas: strategy, risk and compliance, workforce literacy, and operational management. He tells Kevin that the case for AI governance no longer needs to be made; what smaller organizations now need is help asking vendors the right questions and clarifying who owns what internally when a few people are doing many jobs. The conversation then turns to the parts of the field Var thinks are most undercooked. Workforce literacy, he argues, is the focus area most often neglected because it functions as a vitamin rather than a painkiller — long-term, hard to resource, and easy to reduce to a training module when what is actually needed is hands-on involvement in pilots and documentation. He explains why healthcare offers an…
People in this episode
Host: Kevin Werbach
Guest: Var Shankar
Topics covered
- AI governance
- small organizations
- workforce literacy
- risk and compliance
- operational management
Keywords
- AI governance
- small organizations
- workforce literacy
- risk management
- operational management
- Council on AI Governance
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Council on AI Governance
More episodes of The Road to Accountable AI
- Nadav Cornberg (Eve Security): Interrogating Agents Before They Act · June 11, 2026 · 33 min
- Venkat Siva (Compfly): Governing Agents at the Execution Boundary · June 4, 2026 · 33 min
- Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech): Conversational AI and Mental Health · May 28, 2026 · 32 min
- Emre Kazim (Holistic AI): Why AI Governance is Life Cybersecurity · May 21, 2026 · 33 min
- Rumman Chowdhury (Humane Intelligence): The Need for Discernment · May 14, 2026 · 36 min
- Katie Fowler (Thomson Reuters Foundation): How 3,000 Companies Approach AI Governance · April 30, 2026 · 38 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Road to Accountable AI podcast page.