Ask me for the definitive list of approved AI use cases for every department and I will disappoint you. I do not have one. That is not me dragging my feet. It is the correct response to a question nobody can honestly answer yet, including me.
The truth is I do not yet know the best use cases across every department, and neither does anyone else. Prescribing a fixed list right now would not be cautious. It would be premature, pretending we have an answer we do not have. Giving people room to explore, try things against their own work, and report back what actually helped is not a consolation prize for not having decided yet. Given genuine uncertainty, it is the correct response to it. Successful use cases spread from person to person inside a department far faster and more honestly than anything I could hand down.
This happens to rhyme with a real research tradition. Eric von Hippel's work on user innovation found that the most useful advances in a field often come from users experimenting at the edges of their own problems and reporting back what worked, not from the centre prescribing the answer in advance. I did not need the citation to reach the same conclusion, but it is a good sign when practice and research land in the same place.
The honest answer to "doesn't letting everyone experiment without a prescribed list multiply the risk" already exists, and it is not a policy document. Smile, the AI governance gateway we are building at CyberSentriq, grants no new access at all. It gates everything through our existing identity system, so a person only ever gets AI-mediated help with systems and data they were already authorised to touch before Smile existed. Exploration happens inside that boundary, not outside it, which is what lets it stay wide open without becoming a security question.
Encouraging exploration is not the same as abdicating governance. It is choosing where the governance actually needs to sit, not in a list of approved use cases nobody could write accurately yet, but in the access layer underneath, where it holds regardless of what anyone tries.