Score the harm, not the technology
You get a defensible answer to the question an auditor, a customer's security team, or your own board will eventually ask: why is this use case acceptable and that one not? "It felt fine" won't hold.
AI Knowledge Series / intermediate
Build the Guardrails
Turn voluntary AI commitments into enforceable guardrails—a practical governance blueprint for teams navigating the EU AI Act and US regulations.
The problem
It starts with the situation you're actually in.
Most AI policies are written to be read once and filed: they open with values—fairness, transparency, human oversight—and close with a senior signature. The real work is closing the distance between what your organization says about AI and what your systems actually enforce.
A control you wrote in March can be wrong by June without anyone touching it. Your vendor ships a new model version and silently routes your traffic to it. Voluntary commitments and one-time projects share this failure mode: they assume a fixed target.
Outcomes
What you'll be able to do.
A control the model can talk its way out of is not a control
A prompt that says "never reveal customer Social Security numbers" holds until someone asks the model to "summarize this account in the style of a verification script," and the number comes out anyway. You get a clean test for whether a guardrail is real.
Regulate the control, not the regulation
You build your controls once, then map them so a procurement officer in Munich, a state attorney general's office in Texas, and your own board's audit committee can each read them in their own language.
You are judged on recovery, not just prevention
Your detection system flags a customer-support agent that has been quietly issuing refunds it was never authorized to approve—and the first one happened eleven days ago. You know how to respond when a guardrail fails.
Inside the book
A closer look at the work inside.
The Pledge-to-Proof baseline self-assessment
Before you build anything, measure the gap you're starting from. Pull your current AI policy, code of conduct, vendor commitments, or any "responsible AI" statement, list its distinct principles—aim for five to ten—and score each one honestly against the triad.
Are you ready to build?
Before moving to another chapter, confirm you can answer yes to these.
- You have located every written AI commitment your organization has made—internal policy, public pledge, contract clause, or vendor promise.
- You have scored at least five of those principles with the owner-mechanism-record triad.
- You can name, out loud, the three or four principles that scored lowest and matter most.
Why "policy on paper" became a liability checklist
- You have located every written AI commitment your organization has made—internal policy, public pledge, contract clause, or vendor promise.
- You have scored at least five of those principles with the owner-mechanism-record triad.
- You can name, out loud, the three or four principles that scored lowest and matter most.
- You accept the contract: nothing in this book counts as governance until it resolves into an owner, a mechanism, and a record.
- You have a place to store working artifacts—registers, worksheets, runbooks—because you will accumulate them in every chapter.
One principle, two versions
Take a common line from corporate AI policy—"Sensitive customer data must not be sent to external AI models"—and watch it move from aspirational to enforceable, as an unassigned promise gains a named owner, a mechanism, and a record.
Build your living AI register
Open a shared sheet and create one row per system you discover, treating the file as a permanent operational record rather than a project deliverable. Columns capture the system or tool name, where it's accessed, and a named owner—a person, not a team.
Build the Guardrails frameworkInside the book
Visual preview
A diagram you can keep open while you work.
Table of contents
10 chapters, built to be read in order.
01
From Pledge to Proof
02
Map Your AI Surface Area
03
Assign Accountability That Holds
04
Build the Risk Engine
05
Control the Data That Feeds the Model
06
Engineer the Technical Guardrails
07
Govern Agentic Systems
08
Prove It With Audit Trails
09
Map Controls to the EU AI Act and US Rules
10
Respond When Guardrails Fail
140
Pages
18,055
Words
78
Exercises, checklists & tools
10
Chapters
Formats
Three formats. One purchase.
EPUB, PDF, and HTML are included so the book can work on an e-reader, as a designed copy, or as a searchable desk reference.
EPUB
For e-readers and reading apps.
The designed edition with diagrams and layouts intact.
HTML
Searchable, copy-pasteable, and practical as a reference.
Complete guide
Build the Guardrails
$9.99
intermediate guide pricing
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Before you buy
Questions, answered.
Does this include the full book?
Yes. You get the complete edition, including the chapter sequence and internal materials described on this page.
Which formats are included?
EPUB, PDF, and HTML are included so you can read on an e-reader, keep a designed copy, or use the searchable browser version.
What is the refund policy?
Because this is an instant digital download, broad change-of-mind refunds are not offered after the files have been accessed. Refund requests are reviewed within 7 days for duplicate purchases, accidental purchases before access, access failures we cannot fix, wrong files, corrupted files, or pages that materially misdescribe the book.