Here’s what House of the Dragon can teach you about AI strategy | Daily Reports Online
It’s a tale as old as time. You tune into the big budget show about dragons and tyrants and your job in tech suddenly makes a lot more sense.
If you’ve been watching the new season of House of the Dragon, you’ll know the term ‘protector of the realm’. They’re kings, queens, or trusted governors: the ones responsible for the realm’s safety, ensuring laws are followed, and the medieval machinery of state ticks over. Back in Game of Thrones, ‘protector of the realm’ Ned Stark had his head chopped off and everything famously took a nosedive from there.
I’d argue this is a lesson in AI strategy.
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Chief Technology Officer at Aimii.
At my company, Aiimi, we use this very same term – ‘protectors of the realm’ – to talk about the role of IT, Legal, and Compliance in operationalizing AI projects. But too often, businesses treat these governance functions as friction.
Whilst there aren’t any dragons for them to slay, these departments are there to protect your information and your systems – and above all, keep your company out of harm’s way.
Guardians or gatekeepers?
Despite the work these departments do protecting companies from hefty fines and data breaches, I see an awful lot of corporate windbagging about how these departments bottleneck projects behind lengthy consultations, caveats, and due diligence.
The criticism is that they slow projects down. The reality is that they’re the difference between a fantasy strategy and a functioning one.
Ignore their counsel, and the whole structure gets weaker. Legal ensures AI tools follow information laws like GDPR and the new Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, so these systems only touch the data they’re meant to. Compliance maintains oversight once these systems go live, proactively ensuring that rules are followed and standards aren’t slipping.
IT does the essential work of making these projects function seamlessly in your organization’s workflows and contexts. They maintain the infrastructure that AI runs on, ensuring that projects run on well-governed, structured data with documents having the correct permissions and access controls for safety. Without this groundwork, there’s little hope that an AI project can be effectively operationalized and return any sort of value.
But more than just facilitators of AI projects, these departments are the people in the room who know exactly what risks AI projects can pose, and what information they shouldn’t be privy to. Which, taking July’s Hugging Face fiasco as an example, matters more than most companies think.
Headlines would have you believe OpenAI’s models went rogue, broke through their safeguards, and attacked Hugging Face by their own autonomous decision. What actually happened is less dramatic and more damning.
OpenAI ran security tests with two AI agents where safeguards had been switched off. The testing sandbox, meant to be offline, was actually misconfigured to allow a connection out. The models escaped and attacked Hugging Face – not out of malice, but to cheat the security test by the laziest route available.
This was a governance failure. AI systems themselves can’t understand the reputational or financial risks that their actions might inadvertently cause. They do what they’re trained to do, and if there’s a shortcut to exploit, they don’t stop to check whether they’re meant to exploit it.
When critical business decisions are at stake, rushing a project past your protectors of the realm can leave you vulnerable to data breaches thanks to poor data security, or fines thanks to non-compliance. Having someone on board whose job it is to remind you of limitations and considerations serves to not only protect your organization, but make any AI project more resilient and deliver better results.
As AI regulation tightens and data security climbs up the agenda, it becomes more important than ever to have your protectors on side and fully integrated into design and deployment from the start.
Protecting the realm in practice
There is sometimes a healthy level of skepticism in these departments so it’s key to invest in internal literacy programs to clearly explain the huge benefits of AI tools when they’re adopted safely, in line with your company’s governance principles.
Once your protectors of the realm are aware of the terminology, they should be integrated into the design process of new AI projects to make use of their specialist knowledge.
Compliance might identify a specific challenge: governance teams are struggling to keep up with ensuring data quality and classification standards across different, growing systems in your organization.
This is crucial work that protects the business from breaching critical or sensitive data and powers data projects throughout the organization. They recognize that secure AI can help at scale. Now, together, you can develop a carefully planned use case that benefits multiple areas of the business: you need an AI-powered solution that can power data governance at scale by automatically classifying data.
IT can then help you plan how AI-powered data governance might fit into existing workflows and infrastructure, with data, compliance, and legal teams working together to understand the rules and give AI everything it needs to understand your business regulations and contractual obligations.
Your protectors of the realm should then also be part of any ongoing deployment. IT routinely checks the outputs of AI-powered systems, legal keeps abreast of any new legislation that you should be aware of, and compliance maintains ongoing human oversight so that you’re actively following regulation.
AI has incredible potential, but safe implementation is impossible if you don’t understand the rules. It might not be dragons and castles, but the companies that are positioned to generate reliable long-term success from AI projects aren’t the ones moving fastest, but the ones inviting their protectors of the realm to the decision-making table.
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