Team Yes
Summary: Partnering closely with Compliance, Legal, Risk Management, Security, Procurement, and Architecture around a shared goal of finding a way to approve AI use cases — safety designed in from the start, not audited after the fact.
Sources: Handwritten.md; LinkedIn Posts.md (“AI and Team Yes,” posted 2025-11-11; “Safe Enablement, or Team Yes Part 2,” posted 2026-01-16) (original content, authored by Paul)
Last updated: 2026-07-07
Much of the discussion around building a strong foundation for AI deployment focuses on data quality and governance (“garbage in, garbage out”) — Paul agrees, but argues there’s a second, under-discussed foundation element: getting the relationship with control functions right (source: Handwritten.md).
Team Yes means partnering with the colleagues tasked with protecting the organization — Compliance, Legal, Risk Management, Security, Procurement, Architecture — around a shared goal: “let’s look for a way to say Yes and approve our use cases.” It’s easy for control functions to default to finding the No; looking for Yes is harder (source: Handwritten.md).
The key mechanism: bring these teammates in at the initiation of opportunities and co-invent the safety frameworks as an end-to-end design consideration, not a post-hoc audit. This produced dramatic acceleration. Just as important, giving these experts a sense of ownership — not just over the boundaries, but over the individual applications — deepened end-user trust. Gaining and sustaining end-user trust is described as “the key to successful and sustained adoption” (source: Handwritten.md).
Team Yes is the practical, use-case-level implementation of safe-enablement’s “shift left” idea, applies the and-not-or mindset to the approve/block binary, and depends on the kind of trust described in foundation-of-trust.
In the follow-up post “Safe Enablement, or Team Yes Part 2,” Paul reframes shifting guardian teams left not just as an acceleration tactic but as a resilience strategy for the guardians themselves — well-defined patterns get accelerated, less-burdensome approval, reducing rework and avoiding the last-minute crises that burn out already-constrained Legal/Compliance/Risk teams. He names this “Safety Through Design, not Supervision” (source: LinkedIn Posts.md).