There's real AI innovation happening inside your org, most of it unsanctioned. The choice is to back it or bury it in process. Right now, by default, your governance team is burying it. That's a business call. It shouldn't be theirs to make.
Somewhere in your org right now, a marketing analyst is running an AI tool she built over a weekend. It saves her team twenty hours a week. It also touches customer data through a free-tier API in a way that would make your CISO flinch.
There is a meeting happening about that tool. You are not in it.
IT is running it. They will catalog the tool, score its risk, probably issue a remediation order. The analyst will get a polite email about the policy. The tool will quietly die. The team will go back to spending twenty hours a week doing what the bot was doing for them.
None of those moves answer the question that actually matters: is this a tool worth backing, or one worth burying?
That call is a business decision. It belongs to whoever owns the P&L. In most companies, nobody with P&L ownership is making it.
The Default Is Bury
Every major platform vendor has shipped a version of AI governance infrastructure in the past year. Audit logs, data loss prevention policies, agent registries, zoned environments that separate "anyone can build this" from "this touches customer data."
Anthropic and OpenAI have stood up enterprise services arms to bring this structure to companies that can't build it themselves. Anthropic's is a $1.5B JV. OpenAI's is the Deployment Company, capitalized at more than $4B.
This infrastructure is necessary. It is also designed and run by people whose job is to minimize what blows up on their watch. The default posture is "add a review, restrict a connector, slow it down." Left alone, that posture will tell you to flag the analyst's Jira bot as unsanctioned. Then route it through a six-week review process that nobody has the headcount to actually run. The tool dies quietly. The analyst learns not to do it again. The org loses both the win and the signal.
That is what burying looks like. Not a decision. A default.
The technical layer answers a narrow question: can this run safely? It cannot answer the question that drives value: should we be backing this, and if so, how hard?
Three Ways to Back It
When a vibe-coded tool surfaces in your org, you have three options. None of them is technical. None of them is interchangeable with the others.
Triple down. The analyst's Jira bot is real value, already validated by the team that uses it daily. The right move is to put an engineer on it, productize it, and make it the official way of working. Most companies do the opposite. The tool gets flagged, the analyst gets a stern email and a recommendation to attend the next governance training, and the work product gets quietly deprecated. This is the most common form of burying: killed through bureaucracy, not by decision.
Quantify and accept. In commoditizing categories, most obviously SaaS, the speed pressure is real and slowing the vibe coders down is the more dangerous bet. The honest move is to model the risk-reward, accept the internal mess, and live with it. The technical team will hate this answer, and they are right to. They also aren't the ones whose P&L is being modeled against a competitor that ships weekly.
Centralize. Sometimes the bottom-up approach has run its course and the right move is top-down deployment. There are domains (finance, legal, customer data) where the answer is to stop the experimentation, write the check for the enterprise-grade build, and run it as a centrally governed system. This is still backing the underlying capability. It just means the analyst's prototype isn't the production version.
All three are correct, for different tools, at the same time. Your governance dashboard can show you usage patterns and risk scores. It cannot tell you which pattern is a competitive edge worth scaling and which is a quiet liability worth shutting down. That call is judgment, and it belongs to whoever owns the P&L.
PE Has Already Built This Function
The sharpest version of the back-it call is running at portfolio scale right now. KKR's Capstone team treats AI rollout as a portfolio-wide operating lever, the same way they treat ERP standardization or pricing optimization. Blackstone is in talks with Google about an omnibus Gemini license that would cover two hundred-plus portfolio companies at once. Vista and Thoma Bravo cut similar Google Cloud deals last year.
What these firms have built is not a governance function. It is a back-it-or-bury-it function. The person running it is deciding which AI capabilities get centrally deployed across the portfolio, which get left for individual companies to figure out themselves, and which get shut down because the security exposure isn't worth the productivity gain. The decision is structured. The authority is clear. The person making the call owns the return.
The same logic applies inside a single company, minus the carry. Somebody needs to be the operating partner for AI deployment. In most companies, nobody is. The CIO is running governance. The CISO is running risk. The vibe coders are running their own experiments. Nobody at the executive table is making the call about which tool gets backed and which gets buried, because that role has not been created.
Claim It
The companies that get this right will run a two-layer system. Layer one is technical: zones, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), registries, audit logs. Table stakes, run by the people who already run those things. Layer two is the back-it call, owned by a small group with the authority to look at what surfaces and decide what to do with each material item. Triple down, accept, centralize, or bury. The group needs someone who owns a P&L, someone who understands the technical exposure, and someone who can actually deploy engineering resources when the call is to scale. If the meeting is just the CIO and the CISO, you have a governance committee. You don't have the back-it call.
The vibe coders are already inside the building. Forty-seven percent of generative AI users in enterprises now access tools through personal accounts, often paid for personally and expensed as office supplies. Bans don't work. They push usage further into the dark. The innovation is happening whether you back it or not.
The only question is whether you decide, or default. If the answer is default, you have handed the back-it-or-bury-it call to people who are correctly optimizing for not getting fired. That isn't a strategy. That's a shovel.