In 2025, several members of Georgian's Growth Network (composed of leaders across Georgian’s portfolio) began reporting the same thing: enterprise buyers had started asking how their companies use AI, often in the middle of a deal. These were questions many had not faced before, and there was no playbook to pull off the shelf. So they did what most of us do when a challenge is new. They picked up the (proverbial) phone.
At Georgian, one of the ways we help leaders reach a peer who has been there, or who’s willing to figure it out by their side is with the Growth Network, a private community of hundreds of senior leaders at companies we fund, where members learn from one another and create solutions to shared challenges together.
We don't claim to have the answers. Our role is to know who does: when a member is stuck, we work to connect them with a peer who has been there, or also wants to solve the same problem.
Over the years, members have collectively navigated a global health crisis, regulatory changes and more than one technology shift. This post describes how they approached a recent challenge, AI governance, and what the group both left behind and walked away with, as an illustration of how the Growth Network works.
Why AI governance, and why now
Members named AI governance as a shared priority and said they would like to work through it together. "The goal isn't to slow AI down," one said. "It's to make sure we can scale it responsibly."
In 2025, members began reporting that enterprise buyers were asking how they use AI in procurement cycles. In many cases these requests affected the time it took and risk involved in closing a deal. Buyers have good reason to ask: in Georgian's Applied AI Benchmarks, 55% of technical decision makers at B2B software companies reported at least one AI-related incident in the past 12 months (Chapter 7: The Governance Gap, Wave 3, n=252, fielded March to April 2026). Regulation is evolving too: for example the EU AI Act and state level legislation in the United States (e.g. Colorado) and elsewhere. I've written about the challenges and opportunity of AI governance for growth-stage and younger companies in The Overlooked Edge: How AI Governance Unlocks the Enterprise Sale.
From Georgian’s perspective, this work also has a further benefit: a company that can show where AI runs in its products, the owner of each use case and how AI risk is scored leaves fewer surprises for a buyer, an acquirer or a board to find later.
Why AI governance needed peers, not a checklist
There is no shortage of governance frameworks. Anyone can generate twenty versions of a charter in an afternoon. The harder questions are what to trust and how to implement it.
Even published guidance has limits. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is widely referenced in the US. The use cases published alongside it are a useful catalog. But the ones I read come mostly from large enterprises, public agencies and research groups, and focus on what was put in place. They vary greatly in format, say little about what was hard or how things held up afterward, and the contact points are general mailboxes, not the individuals who did the work. For a growth-stage team, those are the missing pieces.
Peers can share those parts, provided there is a safe space for generous, trusting knowledge exchange.
The effects can be transformational. I last saw executives reach for each other with this much eagerness when the web arrived, and I led the Cambridge Information Network at CTP. CIOs went from the back room, to being expected to bring answers, market context and executive presence to the boardroom. In fact, our CIO group was raising date-handling risks early, before most companies had a name for them. They were actually more concerned with the 9.9.99 issue in their software. In response, we were able to start looking for solutions together proactively.
How leaders from ten member companies worked through AI governance together
We invited leaders who had already expressed interest in AI governance and others we thought would want to take part to come together to share their ideas. Leaders across ten Growth Network member companies joined, each of whom owns or meaningfully influences their company's AI governance posture. We built a starting workbook for leaders to move through and scheduled a small series of learning sessions, grounded in the NIST AI RMF, to give the group a shared starting point.
The participant mix was deliberate, spanning functions, industries, company sizes and funding stages. The most important design choice came from necessity. The workbook was too heavy for everyone to review everyone else's progress, so we paired participants to review each other's work.
Some pairs matched leaders at fast-growing companies with each other. Others matched companies in the same industry, an earlier-stage company with a later-stage one or leaders in different roles. Over nine weeks, partners worked through the workbook side by side.
Those pairs were where the details of practice came out. Partners read each other's work and asked questions, so each saw the other's how and why, not only the answers. As trust grew, the questions got more specific. Partners said when something flopped or was harder than expected, and they celebrated each other's wins. Those details produced the insights that were valued the most.
In group sessions, members then mapped where AI was used across their companies, compared ways of measuring risk and decided which risks to act on first. One member summarized the pattern: "The same risk themes kept coming up across companies––accuracy, privacy and access."
What the group left behind and what they walked away with
The group produced and refined a collection of three resources, now available to all Growth Network members. The kit includes:
- A workbook structured around the NIST AI RMF takes a company through logging AI use cases, assigning ownership and scoring risk. It leaves a living document for ongoing risk management, rather than a one-time compliance artifact.
- A charter template for stating governance commitments in plain language for employees, customers and partners.
- A use case library of 71 anonymized examples that the group contributed and categorized, noting what could go wrong and where control gaps remain.
Access the Governance Kit
None of the three is a finished governance program. Governance is something practiced daily, not set and forgotten. In our view, the value lies in the act of working through hard problems, which gives participants pattern recognition and a peer sounding board for the next big issue. And while participants did not walk away from the exercise with a complete governance program, they did leave with documentation they can bring to their company’s procurement conversations.
As governance becomes common practice, whether through market dynamics or regulation, this advantage may narrow. But the relationships formed in the pairs, and the broader group, don’t conclude when this particular collaboration does. They can continue to be sources of value going forward, as participants now have an inner circle for everyday problems, opportunities and celebrations.
As a community, they can navigate what comes next together: how someone’s company measured success, whether a control held up after a product upgrade, what changed when a law did. When someone else has tried an approach first and lived to tell the tale, members can learn sooner what does and doesn't work.
This working group is a microcosm of how the Growth Network is designed to work. I believe every leader deserves someone to call, and many are too stretched to build that list on their own. What we try to do is put a phone on every desk and a knowledgeable peer on the other end of the line.