About

Robin Horstmann

A technology leader in consumer packaged goods, currently implementing agentic AI for accounting and manufacturing and building the foundations it runs on.

Author, The Governed Enterprise  ·  Carthage, North Carolina

Her current work is generative and agentic AI: tooling for development teams, efficiencies across the technical organization, agentic AI for integration reliability, and business-facing agents integrated with ERP for both accounting and manufacturing. The build work behind it is environments, pipelines, and agent tracking.

The work before it was hands-on and end to end. She has led ERP implementations and the recoveries when someone else's implementation failed. She has built enterprise architecture across a complex web of applications, and cybersecurity programs that run from policy through tooling. She has managed warehouse and transportation systems, EDI, and plant floor MES. She has scaled IT organizations through mergers, acquisitions, and rapid growth. Her consulting years were spent implementing systems for mid-market manufacturers and distributors, latterly managing an ERP practice.

That has run for thirty-five years in enterprise IT and more than twenty of them inside consumer goods, across packaged food, pet food, wellness products, licensed apparel, and home textiles. Those five categories answer to four regulatory regimes. Pet food answers to AAFCO. Packaged food answers to FDA under FSMA. Wellness sits between FTC substantiation and an FDA drug claim. Licensed apparel carries contractual and intellectual property obligations food does not.

Robin wrote The Governed Enterprise because it did not exist. While earning the IAPP's Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional credential, she went looking for a guide that addressed consumer goods specifically. What she found were frameworks written for financial services, for healthcare, and for technology companies. They are useful on principles, and none of them answers the questions a CPG operator arrives with: what happens when AI generates a label claim that falls under FDA requirements, what an agentic procurement system commits the company to, and how retailer audit requirements will extend to AI, because they always extend eventually.

She wrote the playbook afterward. She also maintains the AI Governance Regulatory Record on this site, a tracked account of the laws, rules, and court rulings reaching consumer goods companies that use AI, reviewed on a stated cadence.

B.S. in Information Systems and Operations Management, Bryan School of Business and Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Member of IAPP, ISACA, and PMI. ORCID 0009-0004-4790-1778.