Jim Olsen is the co-founder and CTO of ModelOp, an enterprise AI governance platform that inventories AI use cases and models, tracks their cost and risk, and drives compliance workflows. He said every ModelOp client is a Fortune 500 company, and many are banks and healthcare institutions. He joined Jordan Metzner and Sam Nadler in Episode 55 (October 14, 2026) and demoed the product live.
Asked to explain it like Sam was five (02:27), Jim said that if an enterprise puts an AI solution in front of the public, it had better know the risks to its business, patients and customers. ModelOp provides the methods to assess that risk, monitor how models perform, and see what each use case costs.
ModelOp automates that process so it does not become a burden. If it takes a year to ship an idea, Jim said, it has already expired.
The demo started at 04:16 with a hypothetical customer support chatbot. ModelOp showed its token usage and the guardrail blocks pulled in from Kong Gateway, a partner integration.
Because if it's just like a general HR query tool and it's costing me thousands per month, that might not be worth it.
— Jim Olsen, Episode 55
From 06:25 he walked through the full flow:
So we're gonna walk through a really, really simple example today where we actually use our discovery mechanism to query our enterprise platforms, find new models that aren't registered in the system yet, so called shadow AI.
— Jim Olsen, Episode 55
Jim said the walkthrough covered what can take months of work in some organizations, done in minutes. A human stays in the loop.
So we began to think about what that would look like, and that led us to moving into the space to create a company to do this because we ran into it again and again and again, where they either had no process or they had so much process, it would take them twelve to sixteen months to get a model out the door.
— Jim Olsen, Episode 55
So you have to know what you have, what is using what to even begin that exploration. It's super critical when we get into these rapidly evolving models.
— Jim Olsen, Episode 55
In the news segment (16:06), Jim was skeptical of Petlibro's AI-powered pet feeder: his cats already tell him when food is low, and a gravity feeder costs about $10. At 18:33 he described working off-grid at 10,200 feet in Colorado on solar power and Starlink.
For more on how regulated companies approach AI, see our pages on AI in finance and AI in healthcare.
Jim Olsen is co-founder and chief technology officer of ModelOp. Before ModelOp he did big data consulting for large manufacturers and banks, helping them build data lakes for training AI models, and he founded the company with ModelOp's current CEO over eight years ago.
ModelOp is an enterprise AI governance platform. It keeps an inventory of AI use cases and models, tracks their risk, performance and token cost, and runs configurable life cycles that push each use case through compliance.
Jim describes shadow AI as models and agents built on enterprise platforms such as Microsoft Copilots, Amazon Bedrock or Amazon Quick that nobody has registered. He calls it a liability because those resources can reach proprietary information, and ModelOp's discovery service scans for them and reconciles them against the inventory.
Once a use case is in the inventory and its documentation is uploaded, ModelOp's agents read the document, fill out the governance form and check it against policies such as the EU AI Act. Jim said this turns months of work in some organizations into minutes, with a human still in the loop.
Jim said all of ModelOp's clients are Fortune 500 companies, and many are banks, financial institutions and healthcare institutions.
