Rowan Stewart, Sr. Director of Product, AI Safety & Platform at Transcend – Interview Series

Interviews Rowan Stewart, Sr. Director of Product, AI Safety & Platform at Transcend – Interview Series Published July 28, 2026 By Antoine Tardif, CEO & Founder of Unite.AI Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google Rowan Stewart, Sr. Director of Product, AI Safety & Platform at Transcend, leads product initiatives focused on helping organizations discover, govern, and safely use data in artificial intelligence systems. She brings more than a decade of experience spanning AI and machine learning product development, enterprise software, natural language processing, data strategy, and zero-to-one product leadership. Before joining Transcend, Stewart spent nearly six years at BCG X, where she helped major enterprises develop AI strategies, reinvent internal processes, and build products designed to deliver measurable business outcomes. Earlier in her career, she managed the development of natural language processing APIs for influencer intelligence, including sentiment analysis, knowledge graphs, personality assessment, bot detection, and brand-safety capabilities.Transcend is the only autonomous data decision platform that answers “can I use this data?” to scale customer growth. Fortune 500 companies and emerging category leaders leverage Transcend to encode complete data use permissions directly into the enterprise systems that process customer data, delivering a real-time source of truth for consent, preferences, and business rules. The result is superior data quality, ethical use that protects the brand, and audit-ready compliance at scale. With Transcend, companies can unlock revenue from AI, personalization, and other first-party data initiatives with confidence. Founded in 2017 by Ben Brook (CEO) and Mike Farrell (CTO), Transcend is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.You spent nearly six years at BCG X helping some of the world’s largest organizations deploy AI and machine learning solutions before moving into AI safety and governance at Transcend. What were the recurring governance failures or blind spots you observed that convinced you AI governance needed to be built into systems from day one rather than added later?At BCG, I worked with companies across every stage of AI maturity, and one pattern stuck with me: governance always showed up late. Teams move fast to ship a model or a product, and the conversation about data permissions, consent, or oversight really comes into focus right before production and feels like a ‘gotcha’. Whatever gets built at that point amounts to a patch on a system that was never designed with governance in mind.That’s part of why I was so excited to join Transcend. Advising companies on what they should do only goes so far. I wanted to help build the infrastructure that makes governance the easy choice.Many organizations are racing to deploy AI agents across customer support, operations, and knowledge work. How does governing autonomous AI agents differ from governing traditional software systems or even earlier generations of AI models?Most enterprise security architecture assumes that there’s a human on the other end of every action, and that human can be identified, trusted, and when something goes wrong, held accountable. But agents aren’t people. They act on the