Boards are judged in financial terms.
AI governance is not.
AI Governance Direct closes that gap. The Picken Diamond® turns board-level AI governance into a scored assessment, a priced liability, and a signed verdict that names who is accountable — in the language a board, an auditor and a regulator already use.
The instrument
The Picken Diamond® assesses AI governance across five pillars and returns a Board Confidence Score, a quantified value at risk, and a board liability verdict.
It applies established financial theory in reverse: instead of pricing an asset, it prices the governance failure attached to one.
The corpus
Nineteen working papers apply the framework to specific sectors — clinical AI in NHS trusts, SEND assessment in local authorities, cyber accountability, synthetic media, biometrics, professional services.
Each is public, dated and citable. The argument in full is set out in The AI Fairness Machine.
The engagement
Fractional governance director, board assurance review, or a single scored assessment with a written verdict.
Forty years of board-level finance sits behind it, most of it spent explaining risk to people who had to sign for it.
Board Confidence Score
Rose / Buttercup / Pudding / Critical — lifecycle position
Governance Decay Premium — value destroyed
PAAPM+ — governance-adjusted expected return
GALC — governance quality to liability
ALES — the resulting exposure
PAQOS — the Single Signatory Theorem
And what it does not measure. The taxonomy names seven areas the framework does not yet price — training data provenance among them — and declines to build instruments for any of them until each has had the same empirical grounding as the rest. A measurement system that claims complete coverage is the one to distrust.