Validara inventories the AI tools running inside your business and scores each one against six risk domains — so you can hand a customer, insurer, or regulator a defensible answer to a question they're starting to ask: how do you actually govern the AI you use?
Validara measures how well the AI inside a business is governed — turning invisible, unmanaged AI use into an evidence-based score any customer, insurer, or regulator can trust.
Validara is led by a quality-assurance leader with over 15 years testing and signing off software before it ships — owning test strategy and leading QA teams. That discipline is the whole idea: governance you can evidence, not governance you're asked to take on trust.
Every claim on this page is one you can check — the method is published, the credentials are real, and the limitations are stated. The same standard Validara holds your AI to.
Owning test strategy, leading and mentoring QA teams, signing software off before it ships. Assessment built by someone whose career was proving things work — not asserting they do.
No vendor partnerships, no reselling, no referral commission. Validara has no product to sell you off the back of the findings — which is precisely what makes the findings worth reading.
Six risk domains, weighted and reasoned in the open. The scoring model and its limitations are set out in the whitepaper — read the method before you buy the assessment.
Read the whitepaper (PDF) →Operating through an existing UK registered company carrying professional indemnity and liability cover — the paperwork a procurement team asks for before an engagement, already in place.
The framework is mapped toward ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI RMF, and aligned to current UK obligations. Building toward that alignment — not claiming an accreditation Validara doesn't hold.
AI enters a business bottom-up — individual staff, free tiers, personal accounts — faster than any policy can track. That gap is invisible until something goes wrong, or until someone asks you to prove otherwise.
Staff adopt AI tools without approval, oversight, or a record. Most businesses can't produce a complete list of the AI in use across their teams.
No named owner, no acceptable-use policy, no approval trail. When a regulator or customer asks "who's responsible for this?", there's no answer.
Ticking "yes, we have a policy" convinces no one. What carries weight is evidence — the policy itself, the access logs, the review records.
Most assessments are a report that's out of date within a quarter. Validara is a living register: assessed, signed off by a human, and kept honest as your AI use changes.
We find the AI actually in use — including shadow tools hiding in expenses, browser extensions, and features buried inside everyday software.
Each tool is scored against six risk domains. Every "in place" answer is expected to be backed by evidence, not just claimed.
AI does a first pass to speed things up; a human assessor confirms or overrides every judgement before anything is finalised.
A weighted score, a tier, a prioritised remediation list, and a register you can hand to any customer, insurer, or auditor.
Tools flag for re-review as they age. New tools get added, retired ones get closed off properly — so the register never goes stale.
Not an even average. Data Exposure carries the most weight because it maps to the highest-consequence, most-regulated failure modes.
What data enters AI tools, where it flows, how long it's kept.
Named owner, acceptable-use policy, approval before deployment.
Role-based access, no shared logins, periodic review.
Human review of outputs, incident path, log retention.
Spend monitored, caps in place, ongoing value reviewed.
Fallback if unavailable, SLA known, exit plan in place.
Validara uses AI inside its own workflow — to read your policies and draft a first-pass score in minutes. But an unverified machine judgement is exactly the ungoverned AI use this exists to catch.
So every AI-suggested answer stays flagged until a human confirms it. The final report is only issued when nothing is left unverified. It's the framework practising what it preaches.
There's no UK AI Act coming soon — and that's exactly why businesses are confused. AI is governed through several overlapping regimes, and the pressure is already arriving.
New UK GDPR Articles 22A–22D require documented safeguards — transparency, human review, right to contest — around automated decisions.
The ICO is producing a code of practice on AI and automated decision-making, with active work on AI in the workplace.
Enterprise procurement and insurance renewals increasingly ask suppliers how they govern AI. Most have nothing to show.
The common thread across every one of these is documentation: a named owner, a register of what's in use, evidence of oversight. That's precisely what Validara produces.
A structured AI assessment: full inventory, a risk score for every tool, and a report you can hand to any customer, insurer, or auditor who asks.