How Leidos Made AI Governance the Foundation for AI Innovation with Trustible

Leidos builds and deploys AI systems inside some of the most regulated, mission-critical environments in the world: defense, intelligence, civil, and health programs where a stalled review can mean a stalled mission. As the company’s AI portfolio expanded across those programs, its governance process didn’t expand with it. Reviews built for a smaller, simpler portfolio were now standing between good AI and the people who needed it.

The Bottleneck Behind the Mission

Leidos was managing dozens of AI use cases across business units, and each business unit had built its own documentation practices and its own review cadence. As AI adoption accelerated across defense, intelligence, civil, and health programs, the process no longer made sense.

The fragmentation showed up in three places:

• Duplicate documentation: Without a shared system of record, teams re-created governance paperwork that likely already existed somewhere else in the organization.
• Limited enterprise visibility: Central governance teams couldn’t see risk patterns across the portfolio or scale consistent controls, because each business unit’s records lived in a different format, in a different place.
• Reviews measured in weeks: Initial governance intake took weeks regardless of how much risk a use case actually carried, so low-risk projects waited behind the same process as high-risk ones.

As Leidos’ AI strategy matured, the need for a single system of record to understand enterprise AI deployment became a business requirement, not a nice-to-have.

Building a Single System of Record for AI

Leidos had a choice: accept governance as a permanent brake on AI deployment, or rebuild it to match the scale of the business. Leidos partnered with Trustible to support that rebuild.

Using Trustible’s AI Inventory, Automated Workflows, and Risk Intelligence, combined with Leidos’ own governance tradecraft, the two teams built a centralized view of AI use cases across the enterprise:

• AI Inventory: A single source of truth for what AI existed, where it was deployed, and who owned it, replacing the spreadsheets and email threads governance teams had relied on to track the portfolio.
• Automated Workflows: Batch processing and pre-built risk cards gave Leidos a way to move many use cases through intake at once instead of one at a time.
• Risk Intelligence: Automated risk tiering and Insights Taxonomies surfaced relevant mitigations and routed each review to the right stakeholders based on impact, not on habit.

“The scale of our organization requires a complementary scale in AI Governance. We need to move in lockstep with the business, no matter how many AI use cases that entails. Trustible allows us to streamline our intake and management using a range of tools like batch processing, pre-built risk cards, and more. These are major unlocks for us that get more effective the more we scale,” said Geoff Schaefer, VP of AI Strategy & Governance at Leidos.

The shift wasn’t just a new tool. It was a new design principle: build governance for the scale you’re growing into, not the scale you started at. “Trustible helped us translate our vision for a practice befitting our company’s 47,000 people into a practical set of tools and techniques,” Geoff said.

Compressing Governance Timelines Without Lowering the Bar

The most immediate impact was speed. During implementation, Leidos used Trustible to cut initial AI governance intake from weeks to hours, and in some cases minutes, depending on system complexity and risk profile.

With Trustible in place, Leidos saw:

Faster intake, without skipping steps

The acceleration didn’t come from cutting corners. Trustible’s Risk Management and Insights Taxonomies automated risk tiering and surfaced mitigations automatically, so reviewers started with context instead of a blank page.

Risk-based review, not one-size-fits-all

Low-risk use cases moved through quickly. Higher-risk systems still received deeper review from a senior AI Governance Board, with a clear audit trail documenting every decision along the way.

One source of truth across teams

AI technology teams, risk, legal, privacy, and mission teams began working from the same records instead of parallel ones. Reviews moved faster because nobody was waiting on someone else’s spreadsheet.

Taken together, these outcomes changed what governance meant inside Leidos. Instead of a brake on deployment, it became the thing that let deployment happen faster, with documentation to back it up.

How Leidos Did It

1. Centralize the AI inventory.
Every use case, model, and vendor got one record instead of several, so governance teams could finally see the full portfolio in one place.

2. Automate risk tiering and routing.
Insights Taxonomies and the Risk Intelligence engine scored risk automatically and routed each use case to the right reviewer, so low-risk work didn’t wait behind high-risk work.

3. Build for agentic AI before it arrives.
Policy Management and Trustible’s AI Frameworks translated Federal and global regulatory requirements into living controls, giving Leidos a foundation that can extend into agentic workflows as they scale.

What’s Next: Governing the Age of Agents

Today, Trustible supports Leidos’ enterprise AI governance with more structure and more automation than the manual process it replaced. Reviews move faster. Teams work from the same source of truth. And leaders have the confidence to approve AI systems that carry real operational weight.

“Our firm belief is that once we hit the age of agentic AI, the age of agents, all of our historical AI governance tools and tradecraft will break,” explained Geoff Schaefer. “We want to solve that problem so our customers don’t have to, and so they can adopt and deploy AI agents with confidence.”

Leidos’ story is a familiar one for organizations scaling AI across regulated, high-stakes environments: governance that provides clarity, instead of friction, becomes a force multiplier for innovation.

Curious what AI clarity could do for your organization? Request a demo to see what’s possible.