guide AI strategy, ensure responsible AI oversight, and promote alignment across business units.

A trustworthy AI program requires more than technical implementation; it requires enterprise governance : clear ownership, risk management, policy, and cross-functional coordination. An AI governance council’s primary role is to provide strategic direction and oversight so AI initiatives align with business goals while meeting Responsible/Trustworthy AI expectations (fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, transparency, accountability, and inclusiveness).

Therefore, the best completion is that the council should guide AI strategy, ensure responsible AI oversight, and promote alignment across business units . This captures why councils are created: to avoid siloed deployments, define guardrails and approval processes, standardize evaluation/monitoring practices, and coordinate stakeholders such as legal, compliance, security, data governance, HR, and business leadership. The council also helps prioritize use cases, establish policies for data use and access, set documentation requirements, and require ongoing monitoring and incident response for AI systems in production.

The other options are narrower operational responsibilities. Configuring and deploying models in Azure is typically owned by engineering/cloud teams. Day-to-day model training and labeling is handled by data science/ML teams. The council sits above those activities to ensure the organization’s AI work is consistent, accountable, and strategically aligned .