The AI Governance Gap: Why Current Solutions Miss the Trust Manufacturing Imperative

Trust was always a system (we just didn't know how to see it). Now, AI governance is repeating the same mistake.

The AI Governance Gap: Why Current Solutions Miss the Trust Manufacturing Imperative

Trust was always a system (we just didn't know how to see it). Now, AI governance is repeating the same mistake.

The AI governance market has reached an inflection point. Forrester's Q3 2025 Wave celebrates "Leaders" like Credo AI and IBM, while promising enterprises that responsible AI can be automated, catalogued, and dashboarded into existence. Venture capital flows toward vendors offering compliance acceleration, asset inventories, and risk dashboards. Boards demand AI governance programs. Regulators threaten enforcement. The market responds with tools.

However, these solutions share a fundamental blind spot: they treat governance as a reactive compliance function rather than a proactive system for building trust. They catalog AI assets after deployment rather than embedding trust into design. They audit outcomes after harm has occurred rather than preventing trust debt from accumulating. Most critic…