From Intention to Evidence: Operationalizing AI Governance

This event is at capacity. As we have cancelations (there always are) we will add more guests from the waitlist.

The Inaugural Nonprofit AI GovOps Foundation Event

AI governance is entering its next phase.

What began as principles, policies, and ethics statements is rapidly becoming an operational mandate—one that must run in code, integrate with CI/CD and MLOps pipelines, and stand up to regulatory, legal, and enterprise scrutiny.

On February 26, the Nonprofit AI GovOps Foundation is hosting its first-ever focused event at AI House to bring together the people shaping what AI governance will actually look like in practice in 2026 and beyond.

This is not a compliance briefing or a theoretical debate.

This is a high-signal panel discussion with operators, investors, and responsible AI leaders who are actively building, deploying, funding, and governing real AI systems at scale. Together, they will share where AI governance is headed next—and what organizations must do now to stay ahead.

Panelists include:

Rich Tong (CEO and Founder of TNE.AI): Rich Tong has spent three decades at the forefront of every major tech wave, from the PC revolution to mobile, cloud, and now AI. At Microsoft, Rich helped turn Excel from an underdog into a global powerhouse and later steered flagship products like Windows NT, SQL Server, and Exchange, scaling enterprise revenues from $49M to $12.5B. After Microsoft, Rich co-founded Ignition Partners and Qiming Venture Partners, two venture firms now managing over $11B with early bets on giants like DocuSign and Xiaomi. Today, he is leading TNE.ai to build enterprise AI platforms powered by the latest in large language models.

Andreas Bohman is the Vice President for UW Information Technology and CIO for the University of Washington (UW). In this role, he is responsible for shaping the strategic technology direction for the UW, fostering collaboration and community among the University’s IIT organizations, and overseeing the people and services of the central technology organization. Andreas has over 20 years of leadership experience in technology, operations, and military special operations, having served in roles ranging from municipal government and multi-billion-dollar- dollar corporations. Originally from Sweden, Andreas infuses his leadership with a unique blend of global perspectives and practical expertise. He holds a master’s degree in information assurance and cybersecurity from Norwich University and an executive MBA from Washington State University.

Dr. Shanu Sushmita is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University and Founder of the GenAI Research Lab in Seattle. She is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Tacoma and Ambassador for Women in AI, Washington State. Her research focuses on AI security and responsible large language models, including jailbreak detection, adversarial evaluation, hallucination benchmarking, and machine-generated content detection. She has also led extensive work on AI-driven content moderation in music to protect children and adolescents. Her work develops benchmark datasets and open-source frameworks that translate AI governance principles into measurable, operational safeguards.

What we’ll explore:

Why “governance-as-policy” is failing—and what replaces it
How AI governance is moving into runtime, pipelines, and production systems
What regulators, enterprises, and auditors will actually expect by 2026
Where AI GovOps becomes a strategic advantage, not a bottleneck
The emerging tooling, architectures, and evidence layers that matter

This event marks the launch of an AI GovOps community—a place for builders, buyers, researchers, and investors who believe governance must move at DevOps speed and be provable, auditable, and operational by design.

If you are building AI systems, investing in them, deploying them inside enterprises, or shaping the rules that govern them, this is the room to be in.

Space is intentionally limited to keep the discussion candid, practical, and forward-looking.

From Intention to Evidence Operationalizing AI Governance