Governments have moved rapidly from experimenting with artificial intelligence to deploying it in operational settings. But a gap has emerged between governments’ ambition to scale AI and their ability to deploy systems with confidence.
Trust Imperative 5.0—the fifth installment in an ongoing collaboration between BCG and Salesforce—finds that most governments have established AI ethics principles, governance models, or national frameworks. The challenge lies in day-to-day execution.
Across the ten countries examined, common uncertainties persist around how to classify AI risk, what evidence is sufficient, who holds decision authority, and what constitutes “safe enough” for different use cases. Where the answers are unclear, assurance contributes to delays, duplication, and inconsistent outcomes.
To complicate matters, current frameworks predate the rise of agentic AI systems, creating unresolved questions about how to manage human oversight, risk, and accountability. Governments making progress focus on practical, proportionate assurance aligned with delivery. Key priorities include:
- Making risk triage real and proportionate
- Making named accountability usable, not nominal
- Redesigning assurance for GenAI and agentic systems
- Embedding assurance into delivery rather than bolting it on at the end
- Moving from static approval to staged and lifecycle assurance
- Creating reusable artifacts for common patterns
- Combining local literacy with shared technical assurance capability
- Measuring whether assurance is finding opportunity as well as managing risk
This report assesses whether AI risk, assurance, and governance frameworks are fit for purpose, how they perform in practice, and whether they strike the right balance between creating public value and mitigating risk. It also highlights what is working well in AI assurance, where friction arises, and where targeted refinements could better support AI adoption at scale. Governments that make assurance more usable can capture significant productivity gains—up to $1.75 trillion annually by 2033—while maintaining public trust.
