Governance That Scales with Your Organization

One user is easy to govern. A thousand users across fifty teams is hard—unless your governance system understands organizational structure.

Policy inheritance makes enterprise AI governance manageable.

The Governance Scaling Problem

Without inheritance, you’d need:

• Individual policies for each user
• Manual updates when things change
• Inconsistent enforcement across teams
• Administrative overhead that doesn’t scale

How Policy Inheritance Works

Zentinelle organizes governance hierarchically:

Organization
├── Policy: "No PII in prompts"
├── Policy: "GPT-4 only"
│
├── Engineering
│   ├── Policy: "Can use CodeLlama"
│   ├── Backend Team
│   │   └── User: Alice (inherits all above)
│   └── Frontend Team
│       └── User: Bob (inherits all above)
│
└── Marketing
    ├── Policy: "Claude preferred"
    └── User: Carol (inherits org + marketing)

Policies flow down. Set once, apply everywhere.

What Gets Inherited

Model permissions: Which AI models can be used

Content policies: What content is allowed/blocked

Data access: Which data sources are available

Tool permissions: What tools/actions are permitted

Rate limits: Usage caps and quotas

Budget limits: Spending controls

Override and Specialization

Lower levels can specialize but not violate:

Allowed:

• Organization: “Max $1000/month”
• Team: “Max $500/month” (more restrictive)

Not allowed:

• Organization: “No GPT-3.5”
• Team: “GPT-3.5 OK” (violates parent)

Stricter is OK. Looser requires parent change.

Use Cases

Regulated industries: Org-level compliance policies inherited by everyone.

Cost management: Org budget split to team budgets split to user budgets.

Model governance: Approved models at org level, team-specific preferences below.

Data access: General data access org-wide, sensitive data restricted to specific teams.

Managing at Scale

With inheritance:

Add new user: Assign to team → automatically gets all applicable policies

Update org policy: Change once → applies to everyone

Create new team: Inherits org defaults → add team-specific policies

Audit compliance: Check policy chain → see exactly what applies to any user

The Inheritance Checklist

Setting up policy inheritance:

• Define organizational structure
• Identify org-wide policies
• Identify team-specific policies
• Configure inheritance hierarchy
• Test policy application
• Document policy reasoning

Governance that scales.

Set up policy inheritance with Zentinelle →