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As the market for AI governance begins to heat up and take shape, vendors have started to jostle for position. One of those vendors is Collibra, which is eager to build on its success in data governance and stake out a claim near the top of the heap of this quickly emerging field.
Collibra spent the first 15 years of its existence fighting for respect in the nascent data governance market. The company, which is based in Brussels, Belgium and New York City, fought back against the perception that data governance wasn’t really a thing and that it didn’t deserve its own category.
“In the early days, the people called us stupid because data governance was a people and process problem,” says Stijn Christiaens, the company’s co-founder and chief data citizen. “We obviously expanded throughout those years because we have a category-creating strategy as a company. We said we want to be the leader in data governance software, and we are.”
That confidence finally bore fruit with IT analysts this month with the first-ever Gartner Magic Quadrant report covering the data governance space, which BigDATAwire covered last week. Gartner elected to group data governance and analytics governance into the same Magic Quadrant, and it put Collibra in the leaders quadrant, alongside IBM and Informatica.
“We’ve been saying to Gartner for more than a decade, where is your Magic Quadrant for data governance?” Christiaens says. “They never had one because it’s a political kerfuffle. Governance was part of metadata. It was part of master data. It was part of data quality quadrants. But now they have one.”
And just as data governance is finally getting the respect that it deserves, along comes another governance-related field. AI governance wasn’t really on anybody’s radar until late November 2022, when OpenAI dropped ChatGPT on the world. As companies began to play around with the technology, they quickly realized that it needed governance, Christiaens says.
“What you’re seeing now is the leaders jump on AI governance first,” he tells BigDATAwire. “Governance comes in the beginning, not at the end. So the leaders in data analytics and AI, they’re already taking on AI governance from the start, and we’re seeing that in our customer base.”
Nine months ago, Collibra launched its AI governance product, which is designed to minimize the risk of adoption of AI and maximize the return on investment by increasing visibility into how the AI models work, and automating governance workflows that surround them. Collibra AI Governance was the most popular beta product the company has ever had, Christiaens says, and the product has been selling very well.
Collibra AI Governance monitors AI models to lower risks (Image courtesy Collibra)
What do customers get with Collibra AI Governance? For starters, it allows customers to manage AI models alongside the same controls they use to manage and govern data with the company’s Data Intelligence suite. It also leverages Collibra’s existing data security and privacy capabilities to ensure that data used to train AI models doesn’t violate policies, and that personally identifiable information (PII) is inaccessible from AI apps. The software also allows data scientists to collaborate, and allows executives and decision-makers to track the risks that AI apps pose to privacy, IP rights, ethics, and compliance.
Collibra is developing both of its governance products together. That’s because data and AI governance go hand in hand, according to Christiaens.
“We said we want to be the leader in data governance software, and we are,” he says. “We believe that this space of data governance software, as a software category, is expanding into more of a data and AI governance space, because the two are very much overlapping. They have their differences, but ultimately they have a big, big joint component, for AI doesn’t work without data.”
Today Collibra made several announcements bolstering its position in the AI governance space including ISO 42001 certification, signing the European Commission’ AI Pact, and releasing an EU AI Act Assessment Tool.
Stijn “Stan” Christiaens, co-founder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra
ISO 42001 is the first standard for certifying an AI management system. Companies that receive the certification from the International Standards Organization, such as Collibra, have passed certain requirements with their own internal AI applications. Per the ISO, these include: ensuring the ethical and responsible use of AI; maintaining trust in AI apps; supporting compliance with rules and regulations; managing AI risks; and encouraging innovation within a framework.
“We’re very much into putting our money where our mouth is,” Christiaens says. “I’m running our own data office using our own products, and us having ourselves certified by third parties for the AI management systems is a way to show to our customers that this is not just something that an intern put together on an LLM. There’s some scrutiny behind it.”
Signing the European Commission’ AI Pact demonstrates Collibra’s commitment to promoting AI transparency, fairness, and accountability. That’s an important signal to share with its customers as the EU AI Act heads towards full enforcement in August 2026 (it entered a period of voluntary compliance last summer).
The new EU AI Act Assessment Tool will work with Collibra’s AI Governance product to help guide customers’ on their EU AI Act compliance journey, Christiaens says.
“We are announcing the EU AI Assessment Tool to help companies comply with that upcoming regulation,” he says. “As you know, people have their hands in their hair for AI period, but it gets even worse when you have to put your hands in your hair for the regulation that’s coming, whereby you have to balance the innovation versus the compliance somehow, and nobody knows what to expect just yet because it’s so new.”
The market is just starting to heat up in AI governance. IDC predicts that the market will ramp up significantly in 2026, and so the vendors that want to lead in this space, such as Collibra, are preparing now.
“We like to think of the future of this category as a unified governance approach, which includes data and which includes AI,” Christiaens says.
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