Making AI part of your GRC strategy: A checklist for boards and leaders
More efficient, accurate audits and timely risk management. More effective board performance, from smarter agendas to real-time information at directors’ fingertips. Simpler, faster decision-making — even for complex issues and problems.
You’ve read about all the potential AI can bring to governance, risk and compliance (GRC). You’ve probably imagined AI at work in your team’s daily work, especially as GRC roles, responsibilities and workloads continue to grow.
But all these visions are of little value if they never make it past your email chains, committee meetings or the water cooler.
How do you move from AI consideration to actual adoption — and give all this potential life?
Here’s an eight-step checklist for board directors and administrators, general counsel, corporate secretaries and C-suite leaders in charge of risk, audit, information security, finance and beyond.
Step 1: Look at your current operations
The first step toward building stronger AI-powered GRC processes is looking at the processes you currently have — and, more importantly, where they’re letting you down.
Are you struggling with timely oversight of new rules and reporting requirements, increasing the risk of regulatory violations and fines? Has it become difficult to bring the most relevant risk data to surface for a time-sensitive and high-stakes decision? Are manual controls or siloed data makingrisk monitoring inefficient — or leaving dangerous gaps?
Then ask yourself: Where could AI’s capacity to collect real-time data across multiple sources, sift through it at super-human speeds and accelerate and automate tasks do the most good?
Step 2: Define your objectives
Now it’s time to get focused with SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely — goals. Some examples include:
- Integrating the latest regulatory updates into the board’s compliance or risk reporting by a certain date
- Decreasing the administrative hours involved in preparing the report
- Bringing red flags or potential problems to board discussions in a more timely, actionable fashion
Step 3: Select the right AI tools
To bring steps 1 and 2 to life, your organization needs the right tools.
Even as high-wattage applications like ChatGPT dominate the headlines, it’s important to remember that AI is a broad-ranging, multifaceted technology, and application of it is by no means a one-size-fits-all affair. You’ll need an AI-powered solution made for governance, risk and compliance and aligns with your specific needs.
Administrators bogged down by too many tasks, too few hours in the day and no room for error might seek timesaving, accuracy-enhancing automation.
Boards looking for a more complete, timely view of their environmental footprint or supply chain might consider AI-powered modeling, with visualization and dashboard tools and virtual assistants to swiftly answer specific questions 24/7.
And compliance leaders tasked to incorporate a firehose of new rules and reporting requirements into existing policies and procedures might considerAI-powered tools that makes the data compilation, consolidation, reconciliation and categorization seamless.
Step 4: Have a plan
The practical work of smoothly integrating AI-powered automation, analysis and more into your operations goes beyond installing a piece of software or downloading an app — especially for more complex operations like those involved in governance, risk and compliance.
You’ll need to figure out the who, what, why, when and how of implementation, with a plan that covers:
- Integration with existing systems
- Data management
- Keeping everything secure throughout
Step 5: Prioritize ethics and compliance
Safety, security and ethics should be a priority.
When evaluating potential AI solutions, ask vendors questions like the following:
- How is the AI data trained?
- Is AI-generated content clearly labelled as such?
- Where and how do humans factor into the process?
And to make sure the people in charge are prepared to navigate the challenges of responsible AI use, make professionally developed AI ethics training part of your adoption plan. One example is the AI Ethics & Board Oversight Certification program developed by the Diligent Institute.
Step 6: Train your team
A good vendor will include robust onboarding and ongoing support in any AI package they offer. The right training ensures that anyone using this technology clearly understands:
- How the tool works
- How people should use it
- What people should use it for
- Ways people should not incorporate AI into their work — and why your organization forbids these specific activities
- What to do if any problems arise
Step 7: Monitor and evaluate
The AI tools you use for monitoring GRC activities will need ongoing monitoring themselves, with customizable dashboards, analytics, internal controls and more. This enables you to make sure the technology is performing as it should — is AI-generated content properly labelled as such, for example — and flag any potential issues, like bias, early.
Step 8: Optimize and scale for the future
Finally, you’ll want AI solutions that are built to last.One critical thing to look at is how models optimize their performance, since AI, by design, uses data to get smarter.
It’s also important to see how an AI solution will grow with your organization. Ask potential vendors about how easy it will be to modify features, introduce in new capabilities and add new users. Also ask how committed the vendor is to keeping up with new technological and GRC developments and incorporating these trends into their offerings.
Diligent AI: Built to bring your GRC operations into the future
Imagine automation streamlining the tedious work of compiling data, preparing reports and mapping internal controls to regulatory requirements.
Envision pre-trained models analyzing performance, prioritizing potential issues and more — at super-human speeds, with machine learning making these insights smarter and more relevant with each use.
Picture customizable dashboards efficiently bringing risks and trends to light, then into context, for swift, effective decision-making.
That’s the power of Diligent AI, future-focused technology tailored to your needs, backed by a team that knows governance, risk and compliance, and prioritizes ethics, security, scalability and success.
Ready to get started? Start exploring Diligent’s AI solutions today. Contact us for a demonstration or consultation.
