What is a governed AI tool?
A governed AI tool is a tool — often built by someone outside IT — that a whole team can use safely, because it follows a few simple rules about who is using it and what it may do.
The five rules
- Each person is themselves. People sign in with their company account. The tool acts as the person using it, never as its builder.
- The tool holds no passwords. Each person connects their own apps. The tool itself stores nothing it could leak.
- Drafts by default. New users can read and prepare, but not send or change. More is granted per person, per tool.
- One record per action. Every action is written down once, with the person's name and the tool's version, in an order that shows if anything was changed or removed.
- Safe when something breaks. If the checking service is unreachable, the tool falls back to read-only instead of failing or running unchecked.
How it differs from other approaches
A personal tool runs on one person's login. It's great for them, but can't be shared safely.
A shared-account tool lets the team use it, but everyone acts as one person, with no way to tell who did what.
A tool rebuilt by IT is safe, but often takes months and loses what made the original useful.
A governed tool keeps the original tool — built with whatever the builder likes — and adds the rules around it.
Who it's for
People in sales, recruiting, customer success, operations and finance who have built something their team wants; and the IT and security teams who need to say yes with confidence. Cresec is how a tool becomes a governed tool.