I spent 9 years as Head of Data at the RNLI, the charity that runs search and rescue operations along the coasts of the UK and Ireland. In that time, I watched the sector go from cautious curiosity about data to somewhat enthusiastic adopter of AI tools, usually faster than anyone had built the structures to support it safely.

I am now Field CTO at Gravitee, which means I spend my days working within the technical architecture of organisations, trying to understand what an AI strategy actually means in practice. Not in a whitepaper. In the systems that real people depend on.

The Interconnect is where I think out loud about what I am seeing.

The name is deliberate. The interesting problems are not happening at the surface, in the chatbot, the dashboard or the pilot. They are happening in the interconnects: the APIs, event streams and integration (MCP, A2A etc) layers where AI agents now operate at machine speed, mostly ungoverned and increasingly consequential. That is the space I care about.

This is not a vendor blog. It is not a policy brief. It is a practitioner writing about what he has built and what he has learnt, with no interest in making things sound simpler than they are.

If you are a CIO, CDO, Head of Data or senior technologist in a charity, public sector body or mission-driven organisation trying to work out what to actually do about AI governance, this is written for you.

Between the hype and the hardware.

Dr Sam Prodger