Governance is part of the product layer because brand trust disappears fast when retrieval and action paths are not under control.
Policy layers
Apply policy at three points: request intake, retrieval, and action execution. Each layer should be independently testable and versioned. When teams blur those boundaries, failures become harder to explain and even harder to fix.
Retrieval controls
Use entitlement-aware retrieval, trust scoring, and freshness checks. If confidence drops below threshold, route to a constrained response mode instead of generating speculative outputs. Restraint is underrated. So is not making things up.
Action controls
Classify actions by blast radius. Low-impact actions can run automatically; medium and high-impact actions should require extra policy checks and optional human approval. Not all automation deserves the same leash length.
Operational checkpoints
Track policy hit rate, retrieval source quality, fallback frequency, and rollback events. These metrics reveal where governance is too loose, too restrictive, or simply blind to the wrong failure modes.