Who Approved This?: Enterprise AI Governance and the Decisions Nobody Owns

Someone asks who approved the AI system. The room goes quiet.Not because nobody has an answer - because there are too many, and they contradict each other. The build team points to the business sponsor. The sponsor points to the risk committee. The risk committee has minutes, but no decision.Enterprise AI rarely fails on the technology. It fails on the questions nobody asked in the room: who decided this, on what basis, and who is watching it now?This is not another book about AI. It is the operating manual for the executive who has to sign off on AI systems and then defend that decision - to a board, to a regulator, or to a customer harmed by something nobody quite owned.What it covers- Why governance designed for traditional software breaks on systems distributed across data, models, vendors and decisions- How accountability inverts, so the people named as owners are rarely the people who decided- Silent failure - the model that degrades for months while every dashboard stays green- What a regulator actually asks for, and why a spreadsheet is not a decision log- Why switching costs run roughly three times the visible estimate, and how to price an exit before you need one- Building compliance that survives regulatory fragmentation instead of betting on one rulebook Built to be used, not just read143 Field Kit tools ship inside the chapters - decision-rights maps, go/no-go gates, review templates, the questions a board should be asking. Each sits next to the reasoning that produced it, because a tool separated from its argument becomes a form somebody fills in.The cases are composites drawn from regulated environments; no organisation is named. And the book makes no prediction about where regulation lands. It teaches the operating system underneath - the part that still holds when the rules move.Who it is forExecutives accountable for AI decisions, board directors, risk and compliance leaders, and the technology leaders who have to work with them. There is no code in it. It is about decision rights, accountability and risk.If your organisation cannot say who approved each production model, who is watching it for drift, and what happens when one fails quietly - start here.