Risk-aware buyers are right to ask hard questions. The answer is to engineer the answers in — not to slow down.
There is a tired framing in which governance and speed are opposites — where every control you add is a cost paid in velocity. For AI in regulated industries, that framing is exactly backwards.
The organisations that move fastest are the ones that built the answers to the hard questions into the system: where the data came from, what the model is allowed to do, how its outputs are evaluated, and what happens when it is wrong. Those are not brakes. They are the reason a regulator, a board, or a risk committee will say yes.
For AI in regulated industries, that framing is exactly backwards.
Governance designed in from the start is cheap. Governance retrofitted after a pilot is expensive, slow, and often impossible — which is one more reason pilots stall before production. We design it in.