Inside Harriet
Why we built the AI control plane
David Buxton · · 2 min read
Harriet didn’t start as an AI control plane. We started by building AI assistants for HR teams — chatbots, ticketing, workflow automation. And that product worked. But the more time we spent inside customer organisations, the more we noticed the same conversation happening around us.
The conversation every company is having
IT and security leaders kept asking us variations of one question: “We know our people are using AI. How do we make that safe without banning it?”
Employees were pasting company data into personal AI accounts. Departments were expensing three different AI subscriptions. Nobody could answer basic questions: who has access to what, what’s it costing, and where is the data going?
The gap nobody was filling
Every other category of enterprise software has a control layer — identity has IdPs, devices have MDM, expenses have approval flows. AI had nothing. It arrived faster than governance could keep up, and the tooling simply didn’t exist.
That was the moment the penny dropped. The valuable thing we’d built wasn’t any single assistant — it was the layer underneath: provisioning, permissions, cost controls, data routing. The control plane.
Where we’re going
So we made the call to rebuild Harriet around that layer. Endpoint AI is the first product of that decision: governed AI on every desktop, deployed through the systems IT already trusts. The assistants are still here — they just sit on a foundation any CIO can sign off on: predictable spend, EU data residency, and shared skills across teams.
We think every company will run AI this way within a few years. We’d rather build it now. If that’s how you want to run AI, see the platform or book a call.
Common questions
What is an AI control plane?
It’s the governance layer for AI — the way an IdP is for identity or MDM is for devices. One place to handle provisioning, permissions, cost controls, and data routing across every AI assistant in the company.
Is Harriet still an HR assistant?
The assistants are still here — they now sit on the control plane. The shift was recognising that the durable value was the layer underneath, so we rebuilt Harriet around it and launched Endpoint AI on top.