Founded on
a conviction.
Governance requires rigour.

Founders Story

Two practitioners who kept seeing the same gap.

Declan Ellard spent two decades inside some of the UK's largest regulated organisations — HSBC, major FTSE 100 firms, financial services businesses navigating successive waves of regulatory change. Transformation after transformation, the pattern was the same: AI was being deployed, shadow tools were proliferating, and boards were being asked to sign off on risk they couldn't see, let alone quantify.

Austin Sharpley came at the problem from the financial architecture side — the conviction that governance frameworks without monetary values attached are opinions, not decisions. Risk registers full of red-amber-green ratings tell a board very little. A figure that says "this AI system carries £1.8M in unquantified regulatory exposure" tells them everything.

The two met through a shared frustration: the governance market was bifurcated between Big 4 engagements that ran to £250k and six months, and SaaS tools that assumed you already knew what AI you were running. Mid-market regulated organisations — with genuine exposure and no internal governance function — were caught between both.

EAIC was incorporated in 2023 with a specific brief: build a methodology that could find every AI system in an organisation automatically, score the risk in language a CFO understands, model the financial return on governance investment, and deliver a board-ready governance programme at engagement close — fixed fee, fixed scope. The Sentinel Engagement Framework and the Sentinel Capital Allocation Engine are the result of that brief. Citadel keeps the programme live after Sentinel closes.

Our story

Founded on a conviction about what governance actually requires.

EAIC was founded by Declan Ellard and Austin Sharpley after repeated encounters with the same problem: organisations knew they had AI risk but had no affordable, rigorous way to quantify it, address it, or present it credibly to a board.

The Big 4 were too expensive and too slow. SaaS tools assumed an inventory that didn't exist. Internal teams lacked the independence that boards and regulators require.

EAIC Ltd was incorporated in 2023 and is registered in England and Wales (Company No. 15383061). We are based in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and work with clients across the UK.

The founders