AI Councils: How Organizations Are Governing AI Ethics and Safety

When companies deploy AI councils, formal teams tasked with overseeing the ethical use, safety, and accountability of artificial intelligence systems. Also known as AI ethics boards, they bring together engineers, legal experts, domain specialists, and sometimes external advisors to make sure AI doesn’t just work—it works fairly, safely, and transparently. These aren’t just advisory groups. In places like Microsoft, Google, and Unilever, AI councils have real power: they can block deployments, require audits, or demand changes to training data before a model goes live.

AI councils don’t operate in a vacuum. They rely on AI governance, the set of policies, processes, and controls that ensure AI systems are developed and used responsibly to guide their decisions. This includes documenting how models are tested, who’s accountable when something goes wrong, and how user data is handled. Without governance, councils become symbolic. With it, they prevent costly mistakes—like biased hiring tools or hallucinating customer service bots—that damage trust and trigger regulatory fines.

Many of the tools and techniques you’ll find in this collection—like AI ethics frameworks, structured guidelines that translate values like fairness and transparency into enforceable rules, or continuous security testing, automated checks that catch prompt injections and data leaks after every model update—are directly shaped by what AI councils demand. They’re not just reviewing models; they’re setting the bar for what counts as acceptable performance. And that bar is rising fast.

What you’ll find here isn’t theory. These are real-world examples: how a finance team used AI councils to stop a risky loan approval model, how a healthcare provider built a feedback loop between users and their council, and why some companies now require council approval before any AI tool is used internally—even for simple tasks. This isn’t about compliance. It’s about building AI that people can actually trust.