Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and Chief Data Officer at Rubrik, runs one of the more disciplined AI governance operations you'll hear about from a practitioner at this level. He set up a formal AI council with his CFO, co-founder, head of engineering, and general counsel to review every tool request coming into the organization, and he walks through exactly how that structure works in practice, including how Legal now publishes a list of conditions attached to every approved tool.
What makes this conversation worth your time is where Ajay is today versus where most CIOs still are. He's past the risk debates. His workforce is educated, excited, and flooding his team with use cases. The bottleneck is now capacity, not buy-in, and that shift reveals a lot about what a mature AI program actually looks like from the inside.
Topics discussed:
How Rubrik's cross-functional AI council routes, reviews, and approves tool requests
Legal publishing conditional approval lists tied to data sensitivity requirements
Why capacity, not skepticism, became the real internal obstacle
The data quality foundation Ajay says must exist before any AI use case scales
Why pay-as-you-go contracts are replacing multi-year agreements in AI procurement
Why Ajay is more bullish on AI now than he was two years ago
Sales and marketing as the next major AI productivity frontier after coding and call centers
