About Governance AI

A governance pedigree, paired with people who put AI into production.

Governance AI was founded by Dr Karl George MBE, creator of the tgf Governance Code. The framework was endorsed by the late Sir Adrian Cadbury, who chaired the 1992 committee that defined board accountability for a generation. That is the lineage our work builds on.

There is a split running through the AI market. Advisors recommend but cannot build. Builders put systems into production but do not govern them. We sit in that seam on purpose: one team that designs the governance and writes the code, built to the standard a UK board would expect. We can show the code that proves it.

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Dr Karl George MBE

Founder and Chief Executive

Creator of the tgf Governance Code, endorsed by the late Sir Adrian Cadbury. This is the governance lineage our work builds on.

Dr Karl George MBE is one of the UK's most established governance practitioners, bringing more than 25 years' combined experience in accountancy, business and strategic development to his work with boards and senior leaders across the private, public and voluntary sectors.

He is the creator of the tgf Governance Code, built on a three-part methodology of Resources, Competency and Execution, comprising twelve principles of good governance. The underlying framework and quality mark were endorsed by the late Sir Adrian Cadbury, chair of the committee behind the landmark 1992 Cadbury Report, and have since been applied in hundreds of governance assessments across sectors and jurisdictions. He authored a 2019 governance publication for the Chartered Governance Institute.

Karl founded the governance forum (tgf) and is Partner and Head of Governance at RSM UK, within the firm's ESG advisory practice. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Governance Institute, a qualified accountant, a founder member of the Association of Corporate Governance Practitioners, and was among the founders of the Institute of Directors' Young Directors Forum.

He pioneered the award-winning Effective Board Member Programmes, delivered internationally, and authored The Effective Board Member (2017) as well as co-authoring Corporate Governance 3.0: An International Perspective on Modern Governance. In 2020 he created the RACE Equality Code, built on Reporting, Action, Composition and Education, which draws together more than 200 recommendations to advance race equality in the boardroom, adopted by organisations including Birmingham City Council, the West Midlands Combined Authority and the Trident Group.

Karl was appointed MBE in the 2004 Birthday Honours for services to young people in the West Midlands, recognising his work as Founding President of 100 Black Men of Birmingham and Founding Chair of the African Caribbean Business Forum. He holds an honorary doctorate, is a visiting professor at Birmingham City University, a TEDx speaker, and a board member of the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce.

Four convictions hold every engagement together.

They are not slogans. Each one ties to a control we write into the systems we ship, the same convictions whether we are advising a board or building production software.

We build, we don't only advise

Most firms hand over a readiness assessment or a policy. We have shipped real systems: a governance platform, a public-sector evidence workspace, and bespoke client builds across property, surveying, finance and restructuring.

Governance is engineered in, not bolted on

Our systems enforce governance in code: read-only database access, append-only audit ledgers, denied-vocabulary checks, confidence floors that overrule the model, and schema-constrained outputs.

Advisory by design. The human decides

AI assists; a named person decides, and we can prove who decided and when. Our systems don't score bids, post to the ledger or contact anyone on their own.

Built for UK governance standards

UK data residency and UK GDPR alignment, with compliance artefacts mapped to the frameworks regulated organisations ask for, from ISO/IEC 42001 to the NCSC cloud principles.

The people who design and run the work.

A team that builds and runs the systems we advise on, supported by associate consultants brought in by name and discipline to suit each engagement.

Hamada Mahdi

Chief Technology Officer

Leads the design and delivery of Governance AI's systems, from the BoardServe platform to bespoke client builds. The governance controls are written into the code.

Nathan Shillingford

Client Liaison Officer

Keeps client engagements clear, responsive and well-run from first conversation onwards.

Mission, vision and values

What we're here to do, and how we hold ourselves to it.

Mission

Equip boards with the insight and tools to adopt AI they can answer for, in production and not only in principle.

Vision

Every AI decision in the organisations we serve traceable to a named person, with a record that proves who decided and when.

The values we work to

Confidence floors and denied vocabulary: We are candid about what AI should not do, and we design the limits in before anything goes into production.
Human approval gates: Consequential decisions wait for a named person. The system records who approved what, and when.
Read-only access by default: Where AI only needs to read, we remove write access at the database itself. There is nothing to misuse.
Append-only audit trails: Audit trails, citation provenance and plain reporting, so a board or regulator can see exactly what happened.

A registered UK company, run from Birmingham.

Real people, a real address and a company number you can check: the basics a board expects before it trusts a supplier with AI.

Registered name

Governance AI Ltd

Company number

16359543

Based in

London and Birmingham, United Kingdom

hamada@governanceai.io +44 1384 492203 Full contact details

Find out where your AI exposure sits.

We'll tell you plainly what's worth doing, what isn't, and what a board or regulator will expect to see. No pitch deck.

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