AI Adoption Case Study: learn how Holistic AI’s AI governance platform enables enterprises to adopt and scale AI confidently while regularly monitoring risk
techUK’s AI adoption collection of case studies showcases examples of how organisations are Putting AI into Action, either through the adoption of AI models within their organisations, or by developing AI tools that can be leveraged by others.
By shining a light on these use cases, techUK hopes to demonstrate examples of best practice from across sectors and from organisations of all sizes.
Holistic AI is an AI Governance platform headquartered in the U.S., with offices in Palo Alto and London. We offer end-to-end solutions to test and validate the safety, robustness, and trustworthiness of algorithms deployed across various sectors.
1. Challenge:
Holistic AI’s AI governance platform enables enterprises to adopt and scale AI confidently while regularly monitoring risk. Through a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, the company conducts independent evaluations of Enterprise AI systems and offers solutions on risk management, audits, and regulatory compliance.
Each AI system is evaluated against a five-point criteria derived from Koshiyama et al (2021):
- Bias: Risks of the AI system generating biased outputs due to improper training data (training bias), inappropriate context (transfer-context bias) and inadequate inferential capabilities (inference bias).
- Efficacy: Risk of the AI system underperforming relative to its use case.
- Robustness: Risks of the AI system failing in instances of adversarial attacks.
- Privacy: Risks associated with the AI system leaking sensitive information or personal data.
- Explainability: Risks of the AI system generating arbitrary decisions, with its outputs not understandable to developers, deployers and users.
Each of these risk verticals do not occur in siloes and can often be interrelated. A growing field of research strongly emphasizes the trade-offs and interactions that may occur between them. The Holistic AI Governance platform not only allows enterprises to review the performance of its AI systems against the criteria, but also streamlines the decision-making process around navigating trade-offs.
Holistic AI provides a proprietary solution for auditing Language Models through Safeguard, a specialized module dedicated to LM Governance. When specifically evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs), the Holistic AI team uses a robust combination of the following approaches:
- Benchmarking: Involves evaluating LLMs against both, academic and internally developed datasets to gauge levels of model bias, hallucinations, personal information leakage, toxicity, explainability and robustness.
- Red Teaming: Involves adversarially prompting LLMs to unearth unknown model vulnerabilities through mechanisms like Jailbreaking and debiasing.
- Fine Tuning: Involves leveraging high-quality datasets to align models towards safety, helpfulness and harm reduction.
- Human oversight: This involves assessment of LLM-generated content by reviewers for its relevance, accuracy, and appropriateness, to identify any discrepancies that need improvement.
- Assurance: Benchmarking risk discovery, triage, assessment and mitigation processes to regulation (like the EU AI Act), and standards (such as the NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) to aid with compliance readiness and assurance.
Through such techniques, enterprises can be confident that their models function as intended, are free from biases, and robust enough to handle real-world data and interactions ethically and effectively.
Enterprises have found success through the continual use of the platform, which allows them to monitor the progress of an AI system’s performance. The approach echoes evaluations from established industries, such as the financial and transportation sectors, which institutionalize regular safety checks on vital systems.
2. Barriers:
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The emerging field of AI governance faces several challenges:
- Pace of technological development: AI is rapidly developing and the laws, regulations, and standards that govern today’s technology may not be effective in the future. Whether or not the entity is a government or a corporation, established governance practices may be ill-equipped to manage quickly evolving technological change. The Holistic AI governance platform provides a convenient way for enterprises to monitor these changes, but the ability for companies to adapt to them remains a challenge.
- Multiple regulatory fronts: Governments and regulators around the world have shown great interest in the possibility of regulating AI and several different approaches have consequently emerged. It is unlikely enterprises will be subject to a singular approach and as a result, AI governance cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Holistic AI’s governance platform includes a regulation tracker that enterprises can use to stay up to date with these developments. Nonetheless, the burden of compliance is variable and therefore a potential challenge.
- Lack of universal standards and measures: The AI assurance and auditing ecosystem currently lacks standardization, which leads to inconsistency in approaches. Institutional support on this topic varies on jurisdiction, which also causes some uncertainty that limits the establishment and execution of such mechanisms.
3. Impact:
Holistic AI has assured over 100 enterprise AI projects that cover more than 20,000 different algorithms. The company has equipped Fortune 500 corporations, SMEs, governments and regulators to safely and responsibly deploy and scale AI systems across a range of applications. Overall, those who have employed the company’s AI governance platform have seen better visibility over AI deployments, reduced risk, better performance and increased trust.
As a result of the sociotechnical approach that many firms now take, AI is not simply viewed as a technological issue but an interdisciplinary one. Holistic AI is proud to have pioneered its uptake among enterprises as an early proponent of such an approach.
Usman Ikhlaq
Usman joined techUK in January 2024 as Programme Manager for Artificial Intelligence.
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Usman Ikhlaq
Usman Ikhlaq
Usman joined techUK in January 2024 as Programme Manager for Artificial Intelligence.
He leads techUK’s AI Adoption programme, supporting members of all sizes and sectors in adopting AI at scale. His work involves identifying barriers to adoption, exploring solutions, and helping to unlock AI’s transformative potential, particularly its benefits for people, the economy, society, and the planet. He is also committed to advancing the UK’s AI sector and ensuring the UK remains a global leader in AI by working closely with techUK members, the UK Government, regulators, and devolved and local authorities.
Since joining techUK, Usman has delivered a regular drumbeat of activity to engage members and advance techUK's AI programme. This has included two campaign weeks, the creation of the AI Adoption Hub (now the AI Hub), the AI Leader's Event Series, the Putting AI into Action webinar series and the Industrial AI sprint campaign.
Before joining techUK, Usman worked as a policy, regulatory and government/public affairs professional in the advertising sector. He has also worked in sales, marketing, and FinTech.
Usman holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a GDL and LLB from BPP Law School, and a BA from Queen Mary University of London.
When he isn’t working, Usman enjoys spending time with his family and friends. He also has a keen interest in running, reading and travelling.
Sue Daley OBE
Sue Daley OBE
Sue leads techUK's Technology and Innovation work.
This includes work programmes on cloud, data protection, data analytics, AI, digital ethics, Digital Identity and Internet of Things as well as emerging and transformative technologies and innovation policy.
In 2025, Sue was honoured with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the Technology Industry in the New Year Honours List.
She has been recognised as one of the most influential people in UK tech by Computer Weekly's UKtech50 Longlist and in 2021 was inducted into the Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK Tech Hall of Fame.
A key influencer in driving forward the data agenda in the UK, Sue was co-chair of the UK government's National Data Strategy Forum until July 2024. As well as being recognised in the UK's Big Data 100 and the Global Top 100 Data Visionaries for 2020 Sue has also been shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and was a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI. In addition to being a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security, Sue was recently a judge for the UK Tech 50 and is a regular judge of the annual UK Cloud Awards.
Prior to joining techUK in January 2015 Sue was responsible for Symantec's Government Relations in the UK and Ireland. She has spoken at events including the UK-China Internet Forum in Beijing, UN IGF and European RSA on issues ranging from data usage and privacy, cloud computing and online child safety. Before joining Symantec, Sue was senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Sue has an BA degree on History and American Studies from Leeds University and a Masters Degree on International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Birmingham. Sue is a keen sportswoman and in 2016 achieved a lifelong ambition to swim the English Channel.
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- [email protected]
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- 020 7331 2055
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- @ChannelSwimSue,@ChannelSwimSue
Tess Buckley
Tess Buckley
A digital ethicist and musician, Tess holds a MA in AI and Philosophy, specialising in ableism in biotechnologies. Their professional journey includes working as an AI Ethics Analyst with a dataset on corporate digital responsibility, followed by supporting the development of a specialised model for sustainability disclosure requests. Currently at techUK as programme manager in digital ethics and AI safety, Tess focuses on demystifying and operationalising ethics through assurance mechanisms and standards. Their primary research interests encompass AI music systems, AI fluency, and technology created by and for differently abled individuals. Their overarching goal is to apply philosophical principles to make emerging technologies both explainable and ethical.
Outside of work Tess enjoys kickboxing, ballet, crochet and jazz music.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Website:
- tessbuckley.me
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- https://www.linkedin.com/in/tesssbuckley/
Laura Foster
Laura Foster
Laura is techUK’s Associate Director for Technology and Innovation.
She supports the application and expansion of emerging technologies, including Quantum Computing, High-Performance Computing, AR/VR/XR and Edge technologies, across the UK. As part of this, she works alongside techUK members and UK Government to champion long-term and sustainable innovation policy that will ensure the UK is a pioneer in science and technology
Before joining techUK, Laura worked internationally as a conference researcher and producer covering enterprise adoption of emerging technologies. This included being part of the strategic team at London Tech Week.
Laura has a degree in History (BA Hons) from Durham University, focussing on regional social history. Outside of work she loves reading, travelling and supporting rugby team St. Helens, where she is from.
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- [email protected]
- LinkedIn:
- www.linkedin.com/in/lauraalicefoster
Nimmi Patel
Nimmi Patel
Nimmi Patel is the Head of Skills, Talent and Diversity at techUK. She works on all things skills, education, and future of work policy, focusing on upskilling and retraining. Nimmi is also an Advisory Board member of Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (digit). The Centre research aims to increase understanding of how digital technologies are changing work and the implications for employers, workers, job seekers and governments.
Prior to joining the techUK team, she worked for the UK Labour Party and New Zealand Labour Party, and holds an MA in Strategic Communications at King’s College London and BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Manchester. She is currently taking part in the 2024-25 University of Bath Institute for Policy Research Policy Fellowship Programme.
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- [email protected]
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- 07805744520
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- @nimmiptl
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- www.techuk.org
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- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimmi-patel1/
Audre Verseckaite
Audre Verseckaite
Audre joined techUK in July 2023 as a Policy Manager for Data. Previously, she was a Policy Advisor in the Civil Service, where she worked on the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and at HM Treasury on designing COVID-19 support schemes and delivering the Financial Services and Markets Bill. Before that, Audre worked at a public relations consultancy, advising public and private sector clients on their communications, public relations, and government affairs strategy.
Prior to this, Audre completed an MSc in Public Policy at the Korea Development Institute and a Bachelor's in International Relations and History from SOAS, University of London. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time outdoors, learning about new cultures through travel and food, and going on adventures.
Edward Emerson
Edward Emerson
Edward leads the Digital Economy programme at techUK, which includes our work on online safety, fraud, and regulation for growth initiatives.
He has prior experience working for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and has previously worked for a number of public affairs consultancies specialising in research and strategy, working with leading clients in the technology and financial services sectors.
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- [email protected]
- LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-emerson-009189183
Heather Cover-Kus
Heather Cover-Kus
Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.
Prior to joining techUK in April 2022, Heather worked in the Economic Policy and Small States Section at the Commonwealth Secretariat. She led the organisation’s FinTech programme and worked to create an enabling environment for developing countries to take advantage of the socio-economic benefits of FinTech.
Before moving to the UK, Heather worked at the Office of the Prime Minister of The Bahamas and the Central Bank of The Bahamas.
Heather holds a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP, a Masters in Public Administration (MPA) from LSE, and a BA in Economics and Sociology from Macalester College.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-cover-kus-ba636538
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