One market, worked deeply enough to know who's real in it.
AI Assurance Talent is a specialist search practice for AI governance, risk, compliance, security and privacy talent in the United States. Not a generalist firm with an AI vertical bolted on.
I've been hiring into AI companies for eleven years
For the past eleven years I have helped build go-to-market teams at AI startups, US-based and international — including one working on an early precursor to agentic AI in experience management, well before the category had a name or a conference.
The through-line of that work was the hidden market: finding and evaluating people who are performing at the top of their field and are not looking. That is a specific discipline. It is not posting a job and waiting, and it does not get easier with a bigger database.
That aim is not abstract. Some of that startup work put me in the middle of enterprise security reviews — the long-form questionnaires, the architecture calls, the follow-up evidence requests — coordinating between our own engineers and the security and risk teams at Cigna, Amazon, Meta and Omnicom. The pilots went well. More than one of those relationships was moving toward an enterprise license and did not get there. The problem was never that we could not respond to the reviews. It was that we lacked the expertise to recognize that what those enterprises were asking for had to be built, not explained — or the standing to make that case internally while the deal was still live.
On the strength of that, I was invited to start a search practice inside an established network of offices. AI Assurance Talent is the next step down that same line — the same method, aimed at the function that is now hardest to hire for anywhere in the economy.
"Assurance" was not a marketing choice. It is the term for independent testing, attestation and ongoing verification of an AI system — proving it does what it should and does not do what it shouldn't, on a continuing basis rather than a one-time sign-off. Almost nobody in the US hires under that title yet; the work gets split across auditors, compliance managers, risk analysts and security engineers, each holding one slice of it. Closing that gap between the term and the titles is what this practice is for.
I run every search on this site personally. There is no research team behind me and no account manager in front of me, which is a real constraint on volume and a real advantage on depth.
Why niche on a function instead of an industry
Most specialist search firms niche by the kind of company they sell to — fintech, healthtech, agentic AI. That works until the label goes out of fashion or the segment consolidates, and then you rebrand.
Niching on a function inverts the scarce asset. In a company-segment niche the hard part is client access. In a functional niche the hard part is candidate access — and candidate access compounds. Every search makes the map better. Every conversation with a practitioner improves the next role definition.
It also travels. AI governance talent gets hired by AI-native startups, Fortune 500 enterprises, banks, hospital systems and government agencies. The function is constant; only the buyer changes. That is a far more durable position than owning one slice of one industry.
And the timing is unusual. There is no dedicated AI governance recruiting boutique operating in the US today. Entering here is not a share-winning exercise against entrenched incumbents — it is a visibility exercise, which is a materially different problem.
Earning credibility the way this field expects
The professional bodies in this space describe themselves as policy-neutral homes for practitioners, not talent marketplaces. A recruiter who shows up contributing — comp data, role-definition guidance, research — is welcomed. One who shows up selling is tolerated at best.
So the publishing strategy and the community strategy are the same strategy. What is genuinely useful to the field gets published. What took real work to build stays proprietary.
- IAPP — membership, chapter participation, and the anchor credential for this profession.
- OWASP GenAI Security Project — contributing, not recruiting. Overt sourcing burns that room.
- Cloud Security Alliance — where the vendors hiring Field CISOs actually congregate.
- P.S.R. + AI Governance Global — Seattle, October 2026.
A directory tells you a person exists. It doesn't produce them, and it doesn't get them on a call.
Hiring, looking, or just want to argue about the taxonomy.
All three are worth a conversation.