Shadow AI
Staff adopt tools faster than IT can inventory them. Contracts, client data and source code leave through a browser tab.
AI Governance & Security
Your data is already leaving the building.
Standards we work to
- ISO 42001
- ISO 27001
- NIST AI RMF
- EU AI Act
- POPIA
- GDPR
Guardrail Labs helps organisations adopt AI at speed without handing their most sensitive information to systems they don't control.
- 68%
- of employees paste work data into public AI tools
- 11×
- cost of a breach involving shadow AI
- 4 wks
- typical time to a working governance baseline
- 0
- tolerance for untracked model access
The exposure
Four ways AI adoption quietly becomes a data incident.
Model leakage
Prompts and attachments become training data. Once ingested, retrieval and deletion guarantees are effectively theoretical.
Regulatory drift
The EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and sector regulators now expect documented controls – not intentions.
Vendor opacity
Sub-processors change quietly. Without ongoing review, your data map is out of date the week you sign it.
What we do
Six engagements that turn AI risk into something you can govern.
AI Risk Assessment
A structured audit of where AI already touches your business, what data flows through it and what would happen if it leaked.
Governance Framework
Policies, approval paths and acceptable-use rules people will actually follow, mapped to ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act.
Secure Deployment
Reference architectures for private inference, retrieval and logging so teams get capability without exposure.
Vendor Due Diligence
Assessment of AI vendors and sub-processors, with contract language that survives a regulator reading it.
Board & Exec Briefing
Plain-language sessions that give leadership a defensible view of AI exposure and the decisions in front of them.
Ongoing Advisory
A retained governance function for organisations that need continuity without an in-house AI risk team.
How it runs
A four-step process, start to sustained.
- 01
Map
Inventory every AI touchpoint, sanctioned or not, and the data behind it.
- 02
Assess
Rank exposure by likelihood and blast radius, not by vendor marketing.
- 03
Control
Install policy, technical guardrails and approval routes that hold under pressure.
- 04
Sustain
Review cadence, metrics and training so the framework survives contact with reality.
Most organisations don't have an AI strategy problem. They have an AI visibility problem – and you can't govern what you can't see.
Guardrail Labs
Next step
Deploy AI without losing control of your data.
A discovery call takes 30 minutes and ends with a clear picture of where your exposure actually sits.