Is AI governance only about safety, or should it also control product behavior?

I’ve been researching the AI governance runtime category while building NEES Core Engine, and one thing became clearer to me:

Most AI governance tools are designed around risk reduction.

They help answer questions like:

Is the output unsafe?
Is there PII in the prompt?
Is the model violating policy?
Is the system compliant with internal or regulatory rules?

That is important. But while building AI products, I noticed another failure mode:

An AI can be “safe” and still be unreliable as a product.

It can drift from its intended role.
It can change tone across sessions.
It can misuse memory or context.
It can behave differently even when the product logic expects consistency.
It can follow a prompt but break the actual user experience.

That led me to a different framing:

Traditional AI governance asks: “Is this response safe?”
Behavioral governance asks: “Is this AI behaving the way the product intended?”

This is the direction I’m exploring with NEES Core Engine — a governance runtime that sits between an application and the model provider, not only to filter harmful content, but to enforce things like:

identity consistency
memory boundaries
intent-aware policy decisions
runtime traceability
product-defined behavior

The difference I’m seeing is:

Standard governance runtime: protect the company from AI risk.
Behavioral governance runtime: protect the product from AI unpredictability.

For example, in a support bot, safety filtering is not enough. The bot also needs to stay within its role, follow product logic, respect memory boundaries, and behave consistently across sessions.

For AI agents, this becomes even more important because the system may use tools, access data, or make workflow decisions.

I’m curious how other founders and AI builders think about this:

When building AI products, do you see governance mostly as a compliance/safety layer — or do you also need a runtime layer that controls behavior, identity, memory, and intent?

Would love feedback from anyone building agents, AI assistants, internal copilots, or customer-facing AI products.