AI Control Tower: Driving AI Governance for Howden

AI without visibility becomes AI without control

As a large financial services firm, Howden had been rolling out AI across the business to drive productivity and streamline processes. However, with numerous departments adopting AI in their own way, tracking which tools and agents were actually in use became increasingly difficult. Without central governance, this led to inconsistent document uploads and a growing blind spot over how AI was really being used across the organisation.

Rather than begin with a bespoke build, Pulsar deployed the platform's native capability first and let the findings shape the roadmap. Following go-live, Control Tower had surfaced the agents, models and use cases already running across Howden's ServiceNow estate, giving governance, risk and technology teams a single view of what actually existed rather than what had been assumed.

Four outcomes from day one

The out-of-the-box deployment gave Howden four things immediately: a live library of AI agents that Howden owns and manages, kept current as new agents are deployed across the group; baseline content and assessments aligned to the regulations Howden reports against, included as standard rather than built from scratch; a working evaluation of the ServiceNow AI offering in situ, giving Howden a baseline against which any further tooling can be judged; and a foundation for full-scale AI discovery and governance across the wider organisation.

The scope was deliberately narrow: native capability, minimal configuration, no custom development. That kept the effort proportionate to the question Howden needed answered first, what have we actually got, and left full-scale discovery, policy enforcement and lifecycle governance to be scoped properly as a next phase, on evidence rather than assumption.

A single source of truth, built to scale

With the baseline in place, Howden's stakeholders are aligned around a single source of truth, an in-house library of AI agents is ready for reuse across the business, and a governance-first AI culture is embedded, grounded in industry-recognised best practice. Phase two now moves to full implementation, giving Howden's teams a clear path forward.

“Pulsar helped us stand up our AI Control Tower MVP quickly and pragmatically. Core governance functionality was delivered early, the right stakeholders were engaged from the outset, and discovery was enabled to give us a clear view of our AI estate. Throughout the engagement, there were no surprises, it was tightly scoped, delivered to plan, and aligned with our priorities and environment.” — Chris Chapman, Head of Enterprise Applications at Howden