Markets are still riding the artificial intelligence wave, but enterprise AI risk management is where the real work is taking place as leaders trade hype for hard controls.

Enterprise data security and cyber resilience company Rubrik Inc., which counts global giants such as Arm Holdings PLC among its customers, aims to remedy growing AI anxiety with governable software. As the technology’s next moment promises to be one defined by agents, the company is betting that control — not raw power — will decide which deployments survive. After speaking with around 180 customers over the summer, it’s clear that most firms are held back by unmanaged risk at the point of production, according to Dev Rishi (pictured), general manager of AI at Rubrik.

“The number one challenge that organizations [claimed they had] when it came to production AI was not that models are now difficult to use,” Rishi told theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “It’s not that agents are hard to build. They’ve actually never been easier. The hardest thing that organizations struggle with is risk. How do they actually manage the risk around any of their agents, any of their AI deployments that they’re putting out in production? Fundamentally, that’s what’s actually stopping them from being able to recover and discover ROI.”

Rishi spoke with Savannah Peterson during theCUBE’s coverage of the Rubrik “Resilience for Everything: Cloud, Identity, AI” interview series. They discussed enterprise AI risk management, agentic AI and Rubrik’s approach to observability governance and remediation. (* Disclosure below.)

Enterprise AI risk and the missing guardrails

While companies already have bold ideas for agents that can act on their behalf, they often lack the institutional machinery to make such systems tolerable to risk, security and compliance teams. That lack of clear audit trails makes enforceable governance critical in enterprise AI risk management, Rishi noted.

“With human systems, we have employee background checks,” he said. “We have all these areas for when something goes wrong, what to be able to do to remediate. We have our intuition, and ultimately we have someone we can point to. With AI, the wave has happened so fast, [companies] haven’t really developed that.”

Rubrik is doubling down on this market opportunity with its Rubrik Agent Cloud offering. While many enterprises now have AI policy documents that run thick, the harder work is turning those intentions into live controls on the systems that matter most, according to Rishi.

“The challenge … is actually that organizations have all of these policies, all these guardrails, all these restrictions that they’re supposed to have on AI, but there’s a disconnect,” he said. “Those policies are on paper [but] the AI is in software out in the world. That disconnect, I think, is where a lot of the actual opportunity lies.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Rubrik “Resilience for Everything: Cloud, Identity, AI” interview series:

(* Disclosure: Rubrik sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Rubrik nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE