Guardrails Help You Move Faster
Many owners treat AI rules as a brake on progress. The opposite is closer to the truth. Established rules save you from reopening the same debate each time someone wants to use AI for something new.
Prosci’s 2026 research found a sharp difference in how executives and frontline employees experience AI governance. Frontline employees saw safeguards as extra steps and slower work. Executives saw protection that lets the company expand AI use safely.¹ Both perspectives can be valid. A well-designed review balances adding work for the reviewer with reducing a meaningful risk for the business.
Your task is to separate the safeguards that manage a real risk from the restrictions that are not worth the effort. The payoff is speed. Once you have decided what each kind of use requires, low-risk uses can move quickly, while higher-risk uses receive deeper review. For example, employees could use an approved tool to summarize public information without seeking permission each time, while uses involving customer data follow a separate approval process.
Leadership also needs to be clear about how fast to move. A Zapier survey of 548 executives at U.S. companies with 500 or more employees found that 41 percent move fast and refine governance later, while 47 percent hold deployment until governance and testing are settled. About four in five said employees work around governance processes. This may reflect dissatisfaction with company policy or gaps in how the rules are explained, supported and put into practice.²
Those figures show that companies take different approaches to deployment. Within your own company, employees need a clear answer about which uses can proceed and which require approval. If leaders give conflicting instructions, resolve that conflict before expecting a policy to work.
Start with two steps. List the AI rules your people work under and write beside each rule write the risk it manages. Rules you cannot match to a risk are candidates to simplify or remove. Then agree with your leadership team which uses can proceed under existing rules and which require additional testing or approval. Guardrails that match real risks, and that your leadership team has agreed on, are what let your people move faster.
Sources
¹ Prosci, “Closing the Gap Between AI Use and Business Value,” 2026 State of AI Adoption research. The governance finding is also discussed in Prosci’s “Leading AI integration: what separates results from stalled AI investment.”
² Laura Kutch, “79% of company execs say employees work around their AI governance policies,” Zapier, August 17, 2026. The survey was conducted by Centiment for Zapier, May 7 to 11, 2026.