The AI boom is accelerating across workplaces, but corporate oversight isn't keeping up, according to a new survey by the audit and advisory firm Grant Thornton.
Why it matters: A mismatch between adoption and accountability raises risk of regulatory scrutiny, legal exposure and costly mistakes as AI plays a bigger role in high-stakes decisions at work.
- What's making it even more urgent is the rise of agentic AI — agents that work independently on tasks without constant prompting from a human.
- That requires company-specific and standards-based rules to try to ensure AI systems operate safely and align with business values.
Driving the news: Nearly 8 in 10 executives say their company couldn't pass an AI governance audit, even as adoption surges, per the survey released on Monday.
- Among organizations piloting AI, just 7% are "very confident" they could pass an independent audit in 90 days. That jumps to 74% for companies with fully integrated AI.
- Per the survey, "organizations with fully integrated AI are nearly four times more likely to report revenue growth than those still piloting — 58% versus 15%."
What they're saying: "Competitive FOMO is real. There is pressure pushing companies to move fast and show results from AI," Tom Puthiyamadam, managing partner of advisory services at Grant Thornton, told Axios.
- "[The] urgency to deploy has outpaced the urgency to create guardrails, to govern, to be compliant."
By the numbers: Grant Thornton surveyed 950 C-suite and senior business leaders from Feb. 13 to March 18.
- Per the survey, 75% of boards have approved major AI investments, but 48% have not set AI governance expectations and 46% haven't integrated AI risk oversight programs.
- The survey's results suggest that companies that don't implement controls, security and documentation for their AI are in for a rude awakening (performance and risk-wise) once they deploy agentic AI agents.
The bottom line: It's time for companies deploying AI to get serious about governance, auditing and constant testing, especially with agentic AI on the rise, said Navrina Singh, CEO of AI governance platform CredoAI.
- Companies that wait for an incident to invest risk falling behind, Singh told Axios last week in San Francisco at the HumanX conference.
- "I think it's really important to think about governance as foundational, but also governance as becoming a competitive moat."
