Independent AI Governance, Strategy and Risk Advisery
Independent advice. No agenda. Board level clarity.
Ethos Advisory was established to fill a specific gap — organisations adopting AI faster than their governance frameworks can keep pace, and boards without the independent oversight to manage it.
Who We Are
Ethos Advisory is an independent AI governance, risk and strategy advisory firm operating across New Zealand and Australia.
We work exclusively at board and executive level. Our sole function is to provide objective, structured advisory that serves the governance interests of our clients.
Ethos Advisory engagements are structured around the Ethos AI Governance Framework — a proprietary assessment model developed from deep applied risk governance experience.
Bruce Johnson is the founder of Ethos Advisory — an independent practice helping boards and executive teams across New Zealand and Australia govern AI with confidence.
He brings extensive senior leadership across defence, national security, central government, and the private sector. That breadth is deliberate. AI governance isn’t a technology problem. It’s a leadership problem — and Bruce has spent his career operating at the intersection of complex risk, high-stakes decisions, and organisations that can’t afford to get it wrong.
A Career Built On Governing Complexity
Bruce began his career as a commissioned officer in the Royal New Zealand Navy, serving on operations in the Arabian Gulf and spending two years as an advisor to the Republic of Fiji Military Forces. He went on to lead operational planning, training programmes, and capital equipment projects at a senior staff level. That foundation — clarity of mission, disciplined risk thinking, command accountability — has shaped everything since.
At the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, he advised on New Zealand’s domestic and external security, contributed to national crisis management, and helped rewrite the National Security Manual. He chaired the National Working Committee on Terrorism and advised the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security.
As General Manager Maritime Security at the Maritime Safety Authority, Bruce built New Zealand’s national maritime security function from the ground up — recruiting the team, designing a port security risk assessment model based on the ISO Risk Management Standard, and leading the assessment of risk across 21 critical infrastructure facilities nationwide. The programme delivered 100% compliance with New Zealand’s international treaty obligations. It was formative work: designing governance structures under pressure, where the cost of failure was measured in national security, not just reputation.
As a General Manager at the Ministry of Transport, Bruce led maritime and aviation policy across a portfolio that touched national security, international trade, and critical infrastructure. He negotiated international air services agreements directly with foreign governments, led New Zealand’s delegations to ICAO and the APEC Transportation Working Group, and chaired the APEC Aviation Emissions Task Force. He advised nine Ministers of the Crown.
At Careerforce (Te Pūkenga), Bruce served as General Manager Business Services — a senior executive role with responsibility for information services, client systems, digital capability, risk and compliance, and strategic planning across a 36 person function. He structured and led the annual strategic planning process for the Careerforce Board for three consecutive years, translating board level strategy into implementation plans and organisational reporting. During this period he led a major CRM system upgrade, developed the organisation’s AI policy, and designed and implemented enterprise wide process and risk management systems — including the digital platforms used to manage and monitor them.
What Drives This Practice
Bruce has been watching AI develop for longer than most. Years before it became a boardroom agenda item, he championed the development, in house, of an early AI application that produced results that were technically impressive — and that immediately unsettled the people it was meant to help. It wasn’t adopted. The potential was real. So was the human reaction to it.
That stayed with him. He continued to research and explore, drawn particularly to the emerging world of agentic AI — systems that don’t just respond, but act.
Then came the Harvard Business School programme. Working through the ethics, security, privacy, data sovereignty, and human oversight dimensions of AI at that level of rigour didn’t gradually inform his thinking. It hit him.
AI has extraordinary potential. That part everyone sees. What fewer people are grappling with — particularly at board level — is the scale of the downside if it is adopted without understanding, without oversight, and without accountability. That’s not a theoretical concern. It’s what keeps Bruce focused on governance rather than capability.
That’s why Ethos Advisory exists.
Bruce holds a Certificate in Artificial Intelligence for Business from Harvard Business School Online (2024) and a Certificate in Company Direction from the New Zealand Institute of Directors. He holds a Master of International Relations from Victoria University, completed the Executive Programme in Strategy and Organisation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and is a graduate of the Australia New Zealand School of Government Executive Fellows Programme. He is a PRINCE2 Registered Practitioner and works within internationally recognised AI governance frameworks including NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001.
Based in Wellington — working with clients across New Zealand and Australia.