🧙‍♂️The Ethical AI Governance Playbook 2025 Edition

Learn to conduct an internal EU AI Act Assessment and understand how to get ready for the AI Governance frameworks that need to be implemented for startups and NGO to get started with AI compliance.

Prologue: Little Playbook to Comply with EU AI Act for Deployers and Navigating Risks, Compliance, and Ethics (🚨Early Access!)

🧙‍♂️ What this book will help you with:

✅ Distill the years of wisdom of privacy engineering discipline and its best practices and relevant privacy-by-design principles into a playbook to help your organization kickstart your EU AI Act compliance journey.

✅ Chapters include exercises where our book is accompanied by play and quests that you need to solve on the Compliance Detective platform, with exercises to apply what you learn and a separate leaderboard for this book.

✅ Each chapter has a review and comment from a thought leader who brings simple yet effective tips and tricks for organizations starting their AI Governance programs.

✅ Each chapter has a card in a deck of 12 cards that helps you keep track of discussions and kickstart conversations with your team.

🧙‍♂️ Welcome, dear reader

You are here reading this book because you probably heard about the alarm bells ringing as the deadline for the EU AI Act’s AI literacy training requirements approaches. Reading this book will help you start fulfilling these requirements for yourself first.

Responsible AI is crucial for organizations seeking to build user trust, maintain regulatory compliance, and demonstrate ethical responsibility. It encompasses a diverse set of skills, including technical expertise, legal knowledge, policy understanding, and effective communication.

This playbook will delve into the significance of AI governance and privacy engineering and shed light on the importance of incorporating fundamental human rights and principles from the outset of AI system design. It will explore the legal requirements, power imbalances, political considerations, and ethical implications that make responsible AI essential in today's increasingly regulatory landscape, leading the charge with the EU’s AI Act.

The Brussels Effect

Since 2018, we have been bombarded with GDPR compliance, and now it is time for the EU to once again create legislation that will have a "Brussels Effect," making ripples across the EU and turning into a tsunami of requirements for all global players engaging in the EU market.

This time, the EU AI Act is the first comprehensive legislation around artificial intelligence.

Even if you are not located in the EU, just as with GDPR, if you are targeting EU users with an AI product or using their data for training purposes, you now fall under the scope of the EU AI Act. This law goes further than GDPR, imposing fines of up to 7% of your global turnover or €35 million, whichever is higher. Not only that but as awareness increases, AI-related data breaches will also put your brand and reputation at risk. GDPR once thought to be aimed only at big tech, has also impacted small businesses, startups, and NGOs with fines ranging from €30K to €240K—demonstrating that compliance is not optional for anyone.

With AI scandals and data breaches already making headlines, organizations need to build trust with users by handling their data responsibly and ethically.

If your AI model uses personal or identifiable data, the AI Act mandates that you first comply with GDPR before even considering AI Act compliance.

It’s important to emphasize that most organizations don’t build AI systems from scratch. Instead, they integrate off-the-shelf models, plug them in, and hope for the best—or at least hope that nothing goes catastrophically wrong.

Naturally, this has made the EU AI Act a hot topic, especially for those who merely deploy these systems. It’s all fun and games until someone mentions “high-risk AI.”

Suddenly, deployers are saddled with a long list of requirements, one of which includes conducting a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment—essentially ensuring that your AI doesn’t unintentionally ruin lives.

This book offers a privacy engineer’s perspective and a strategy to build up a set of rules and best practices for starting an AI Governance program that aligns with the spirit of the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, OECD AI Principles, the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, the Principles for the Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in the United Nations System, and the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.

By the end, you'll be equipped to establish a compliance program that monitors and governs AI system usage in an ethical, trustworthy, and legally compliant manner.

But this book is not just theory—every step we take to build and integrate these principles into daily operations will align with both GDPR and EU AI Act compliance. Many of these concepts will be familiar to those involved in data protection and privacy compliance programs.

While not all details of the EU AI Act's implementation are finalized and will roll out over the next few years, we can take a privacy engineering approach and do what we always do: inspect systems for violations, identify risks, design privacy-by-design solutions, assign responsibilities within organizations, monitor compliance against key performance indicators, and mature these programs as organizations grow.

Sounds simple, right?

Don't worry—this book is designed to break down these concepts and fine-tune them to meet new legal requirements as the EU AI Act comes into force. In addition to existing privacy-by-design controls, we'll implement additional measures to fulfill responsible AI principles and monitor compliance to claim AI Act conformity.

Founders, managers, privacy teams, and GRC professionals alike can benefit from this book, making more informed choices and understanding the legal and business risks of AI systems in daily operations.

There’s a lot of hype around AI safety and governance—ranging from extreme regulatory oversight to the EU AI Act’s risk-based product liability approach. Organizations like CAIDP have advocated for a more rights-based approach, arguing for stronger protections beyond just risk management.

If you're looking for a way to get your startup ready for the EU market, or if you're selling AI tools to enterprises in the US that require ISO 42001 or NIST compliance audits, this book will help you build safe and trustworthy AI systems.

From Playbook to Practice ✅

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the end! But the journey is just beginning. Compliance isn’t a one-time project; it’s an evolving process that must adapt alongside new regulations, technological advancements, and emerging risks.

To put this playbook into action, consider:

• Building a Compliance Culture: Share what you’ve learned with your team and integrate AI governance into everyday decision-making.

• Engaging with the Community: Join AI governance discussions, attend privacy forums, and connect with other professionals tackling the same challenges.

• Continuing the Game: If you haven’t already, head over to Compliance Detective and test your knowledge through our interactive quests, leaderboard challenges, and case studies.

As new developments arise, we’ll be updating resources on the Compliance Detective platform to help you stay ahead of compliance trends. Remember, this isn’t about simply checking boxes—it’s about creating a future where AI is responsible, ethical, and aligned with human rights.

So, speak friend and enter...

Tutorial & Onboarding for Compliance Detective Platform

Your learning doesn’t stop here! To get hands-on experience with the concepts in this book: 👇

1. Sign up on the Compliance Detective platform.

2. Access your playbook exercises – Each chapter has interactive challenges to apply what you’ve learned.

3. Earn points & climb the leaderboard – See how you rank against others tackling AI governance.

So let's start the first creative privacy project following up with the Privacy Village's #DPD25FEST!

Are you ready? Let's go! ✅ https://play.compliancedetective.com/