Who you'd be working with.
Akkuitt is a two-person practice. You deal with the founders directly, and the person who assesses your organization is the person you meet on the first call.
Why we started Akkuitt
Hendrik has been working with generative AI since it became publicly available, and published a book on it in 2023. The appeal was never the technology for its own sake. It was what the technology does for people who think in systems — organizing, sequencing and orchestrating, done faster and further than one person manages alone.
That enthusiasm is precisely why the caution matters. AI genuinely improves how people work. Used carelessly, it also makes things worse for the people on the receiving end of it: the applicant filtered out by a model nobody reviewed, the client whose file was pasted into a public chatbot by a well-meaning employee.
Governance is how you get the first without the second.
It is also one of the widest gaps in a young industry. The frameworks exist and they are good, but they were written for organizations with compliance departments. Most businesses don't have one. They have an owner, a handful of staff already using AI daily, and no clear view of what they're exposed to.
That gap is what Akkuitt exists to close.
The founders
Hendrik Janse van Rensburg
Co-founder — Governance & Compliance
Hendrik spent eighteen years as an officer in the South African National Defence Force, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. Thirteen of those years were at the Military Academy at Stellenbosch University, where he lectured in geographic information systems and remote sensing, headed the Department of Military Geography, and established its honours programme.
Two roles from that period explain why he does this work. He served as assistant editor of Scientia Militaria, an accredited peer-reviewed journal, and as an external examiner for students at other universities. Peer review and external examining are the same discipline in different clothes: assessing someone else's work against a declared standard, in writing, where the assessment itself has to survive being checked. That is what an audit is.
More recently he was general manager of a Cape Town business with full profit-and-loss accountability, where governance was an operational duty rather than a theory. He maintained formal risk registers, managed legal and insurance exposure, ran business continuity planning, and oversaw the technology stack and its procurement decisions. Before that he spent nine years leading a church with a team of 180 volunteers.
MA, Geography & Environmental Studies (Stellenbosch University) · B.Mil Hons, Military Geography · B.Mil, Human Science · MBA module, Project Management (University of Stellenbosch Business School) · Author, ChatGPT: How AI-Language Models are Changing the Game (2023)
Karin Janse van Rensburg
Co-founder — Workforce Enablement
Karin designs training for a living. As an instructional designer she builds technical curricula mapped to the Cambridge Assessment International Education standard, covering Python, web development and robotics, and she spent over two years teaching them in a classroom. She knows the difference between running a session and building a competency — and, critically for governance, how you evidence that someone actually acquired one.
She built and sold an e-commerce business in the education industry. Earlier in her career she ran a business development programme that took thirty small and medium enterprises through needs analysis, training, mentoring and accreditation, then connected them to corporate procurement opportunities. That is close to the work Akkuitt does now, for close to the same businesses.
She is the reason Akkuitt's training is structured rather than improvised, role-specific rather than generic, and produces the record of completion an assessor will ask to see.
Project Management Short Course (University of Cape Town, 2004) · Basics of Business (University of South Africa, 2005) · AI Security & Governance, Securiti AI (vendor certification, 2026) · Instructional design and curriculum development mapped to Cambridge Assessment International Education standards
What we're not.
A governance practice that overstates itself is a poor advertisement for its own discipline. So, plainly:
Not an accreditation body
We assess against NIST AI RMF 1.0 and prepare you for a certification body's audit where one is required. The certificate comes from them, never from us.
Not lawyers
We identify where your AI use creates regulatory exposure. Whether that exposure constitutes a breach is a question for your counsel, and we'll tell you when it's time to ask them.
Not a reseller
No vendor agreements, no commission, no implementation upsell. We have no financial interest in which tools you choose.
Not an old firm
Akkuitt was founded in 2026. Our methodology rests on a public framework you can check yourself, and our first clients get founders' attention rather than a junior associate.
Thirty minutes, and an honest answer.
We'll walk your exposure triggers, give you an indicative tier floor, and tell you if you don't need an engagement.