AI Governance Global/Local Feature Guide

Overview

Establish standardized global records for AI systems, models, and datasets while maintaining contextual variations to enable their use across business units, use cases, and lifecycle stages.

This capability ensures consistent governance practices across the enterprise while accommodating variations in regulatory frameworks, risk profiles, and needs across the AI lifecycle. Teams can track AI asset evolution through a clear audit trail, enforce standardized attributes at the global level, and manage jurisdiction-specific or use-case-specific requirements at the local level. This approach streamlines compliance, reduces redundancy, and provides clear lineage of how AI assets are used throughout the enterprise.

Solving Complex Problems

Organizations face multiple challenges in governing AI assets across complex enterprises:

Inconsistent governance practices when the same AI model or dataset is used across different business units and jurisdictions, leading to compliance gaps and inefficiencies
Difficulty tracking and managing varying risk profiles / controls when an AI asset is used for different use cases
Limited visibility into how AI assets evolve through different stages of the AI lifecycle from pre-deployment to post-deployment retraining, making it difficult to maintain auditable records

Example Use Case

A foundation model (e.g. GPT-4) is registered globally with core metadata, like description, provider, hosting location; assessment results; risks and controls; related records, documents, etc.. A regional team creates a linked model record to reflect their use of GPT-4, inheriting most metadata and relate but overriding business owner, purpose, and local risk.

Considering this scenario, the following user types have their own respective objectives in order preserve and maintain locality across a global business:

As a global governance lead: , I want to define reusable AI inventory records that local teams can instantiate without losing consistency.
As a local governance user,: I want to modify relevant fields (e.g., local approvers) without breaking the link to the global record.
As a risk/compliance analyst: , I want to trace where my risks or assessments have been reused or overridden.

To configure global/local inheritance settings

On the AI Governance menu, select Setup > Inventory manager.

The Inventory manager screen appears.
Click the View button for the desired inventory type.
Go to the Global local tab.

The Attributes tab will organize the attribute groups (default and custom) into collapsible sections that contain the included attributes. You can configure which attributes should automatically receive updates from the global record (Auto-update) and which attributes can be modified at the local version level (Override). All attributes will be set to Override by default.


Column Setting	Description
Auto update	Attributes configured as 'auto update' are read-only for local versions and can only be modified at the global record level. When attributes configured as 'auto update' are updated on the global record, the local versions will receive the update automatically.
Override	Attributes configured as override can be modified directly on the local version records and updates to override attributes have no impact on the global record or any other local versions.

The Documents tab is where you can configure the inheritance settings for documents related to your objects. As with attributes, you can select whether they will receive updates from the global object record or allow configuration at the local level.
Click the Save button to retain your configuration(s).

To set up inventory record as the global record

Important:

Only Model or AI system records can be set up as global records. The configuration is the same for both inventory types.

On the AI Governance menu, select Inventory > Models or AI systems.
Hover over the row of an inventory record to click the Context Menu icon, then select Set up as master.

The Create master record modal appears.
Click the Create button. You will be navigated to the Local versions tab of the Inventory details screen of the given inventory record.
Click the Add local versions button.

The Create new local (Inventory type) modal appears.
Provide the new local version a unique name and specify for which organization level it will be available.

Note:
The Copy as local version setting will be selected by default and cannot be turned off as it is required to create a linked local version.
Click the Save button. The new local version will be added to the list in the Local versions tab.

To link local records to global records

Important:

Only Model or AI system records can be linked to global records. The configuration is the same for both inventory types.

On the AI Governance menu, select Inventory > Models or AI systems.
Hover over the row of an inventory record to click the Context Menu icon, then select Link to master record.

The Link to master record modal appears.
Select from the existing master records, then click the Save button.
The inventory record will be considered a local version and will appear in the Local versions tab of the chosen master record's Inventory details screen.
To check if an inventory record is set up as a local record with a linked global record, go to the given inventory's details screen. The Master record card on the right will indicate to which global record this local record is linked.

To manage entity settings for global records

On the AI Governance menu, select Inventory > Models or AI systems.
Select an inventory record that is configured as a global record.

The Inventory details screen appears.
Go to the Local versions tab.
Click the Inheritance settings button.
If the inventory record follows the default inheritance settings, the following screen will appear:
Enable the setting, Follow entity settings to designate unique, custom inheritance settings for this inventory record.

The Inheritance configuration changes modal appears.
Review the text in the confirmation modal to understand the behavior, then click the Confirm button.

The Select attributes for automatic update screen appears.
Configure the custom inheritance settings for this specific inventory model, then click the Save button.