Ungoverned: A Practical Guide to AI Minimum Viable Governance

AI is already deployed inside your institution. Comprehensive oversight probably isn’t.The first AI failure at your institution will not look like a scandal. It will look like a workflow. A vendor contract. A tool quietly added to a process. A decision no one remembers authorizing. A policy that seemed sufficient — until someone was harmed by the gap between what it promised and what it covered.That is how ungoverned AI operates. Not dramatically. Incrementally. Inside systems your institution already trusts, making consequential decisions your institution has never formally claimed. The governance gap is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem. And it will not close itself.Silicon Valley learned long ago that waiting for the perfect product means shipping nothing. The same logic applies to governance. You do not need a perfect framework. You need a functional one — deployed now, before the incident that makes deployment unavoidable.Startups built disciplined frameworks to test products before scaling, but most institutions lack any equivalent for deploying AI at scale. Inspired by Silicon Valley’s “minimum viable product,” Dr. Seba, a serial entrepreneur and global executive turned scholar and faculty, applies a founder’s mindset to the urgent challenge of responsible AI governance. The book introduces AI Minimum Viable Governance (AI MVG): the compact, most defensible governance structure your institution can immediately, implement, iterate, and adapt to AI’s rapid technological and regulatory changes — designed to hold under scrutiny and scale as your AI footprint grows.Ungoverned gives institutional leaders — board members, trustees, provosts, deans, compliance officers, and senior executives — twelve evidence-based lessons for building it from doctoral research in higher education with cross sector. You will learn how to establish AI MVG before an incident forces your hand, distinguish real fiduciary oversight from compliance theater, design risk frameworks that hold under scrutiny, prevent vendor defaults from quietly becoming institutional policy, and replace assurance with proof. Accountability is built before the incident. Compliance is assembled after it. Read more