TLDR
- AI governance is becoming foundational — not just for compliance, but to guide investment, decision-making, and responsible deployment.
- EY is embedding generative AI across audit workflows, improving quality, speed, and usability with tools like EYQ Assurance Knowledge and its global Canvas platform.
- Effective AI oversight requires cross-functional teams, not bloated councils, and must be proactive rather than reactive to evolving global regulations.
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, companies are increasingly taking governance seriously instead of as an afterthought. That’s the message from Richard Jackson, EY’s global AI assurance leader, who is helping clients navigate the fast-changing regulatory environment and make sense of how to govern AI systems.
“Governance has moved from being something that some organizations were thinking about as a catch-up to the pace of change. Now it’s become much more the table stakes that most mature organizations are recognizing, and that the governance is not just about compliance reporting,” Jackson said in an interview with The AI Innovator.
“It actually becomes the turnkey as to how you make the right investments, how you make the right decisions around where to plug in the technology, how to think about the broader impacts to the business, to the stakeholders,” he continued.
Jackson borrowed an analogy from a colleague to illustrate his point: Imagine the brakes of a car as the governance framework. “The car can only go as fast as the braking system allows. The better the braking system, the more confident you are to go fast, because you know you can brake.”
EY itself is practicing what it preaches to clients. The Big Four accounting and consulting firm recently unveiled a suite of seven new generative AI tools to modernize its audit platform, the latest installment of a four-year, $1 billion investment in technology transformation.
“What we just announced is actually the fourth year of that four-year journey,” said Jackson. “We already have the most globally integrated audit platform. We call it Canvas. It’s the tool that every one of our 125,000 auditors around the world all use.”
Canvas is used in 150,000 audits annually. EY’s alliance with Microsoft makes it one of the largest cloud users in the world, enabling data-driven audit work that goes beyond sample-based testing.
“The old-school auditing approach was pick a sample of 25 and then extrapolate that out across the population,” Jackson said. “Now, when you’ve got clients literally processing millions, if not billions, of transactions, (our ability to) access the entire data flow puts the focus much more on the quality and the output of what that enables you to do.”
One standout tool is EYQ Assurance Knowledge, which lets auditors get audit and accounting guidance via a chat interface embedded directly in their workflow.
“Someone who’s in the middle of doing a part of their audit doesn’t have to go somewhere else to look up what the guide says,” Jackson said. “They can actually just have a conversation” with a chatbot.
While efficiency gains are a given, Jackson emphasized that the real value lies in enhanced audit quality to do things like “help clients spot gaps in their processes, to identify redundancy, and provide benchmarks against what does good look like.”
Beyond tools, EY has invested in process improvement and talent, raising starting salaries and rolling out ‘360 careers’ to give new hires exposure across audit, tax, consulting and transactions.
“We recognize that the profession has lost pace in terms of the investments we were making in our people,” Jackson said. “We’re really trying to reignite some of the excitement that people like me had when we first joined the profession a gazillion years ago.”
The complex patchwork of global AI regulation
On AI regulation, Jackson sees a nuanced landscape rather than a binary one between innovation and risk mitigation. “You are seeing some of those shifts and some complexities,” he said. “We still see pockets of a compliance approach, … but you are also seeing trends towards both multilateral and multi-jurisdictional views.”
Jackson noted how initial reactions to generative AI when it was new leaned toward fear and restriction, but have since evolved as organizations recognize AI’s ubiquity and potential. “It is actually everywhere,” he said. “It is democratized in terms of the access to this technology.”
Jackson pointed to efforts like the EU AI Act and the U.S. NIST risk management framework as examples of emerging governance structures. Yet he stressed that companies should not build governance systems solely in reaction to laws.
“If you’re only setting up the governance in response to regulation in country X or country Y, you’ll never keep pace,” Jackson said. “You have to recognize that if as an organization, you’re not starting every conversation with – ‘How can we use AI in this business process, in this new product, in our everyday activities?’ – then you’re missing the point.”
But an early pitfall of setting up a governance body is overloading it with too many people.
“All of a sudden everyone wanted to be represented at that governance council … and you could suddenly find yourself with these central groups with literally hundreds of people,” Jackson said. “At that point, you can’t get anything done.”
Jackson advises structuring governance bodies to reflect the scale and ambition of AI deployments, while staying nimble. Teams should include IT, finance, business leaders, legal, risk, and HR – all with a stake in deployment and oversight.
“The technology is already as good as it needs to be to fundamentally transform businesses,” he said. “It will get better, no doubt. But our opportunity now is to actually adapt the technology to the capability it has and to transform our existing processes today.”
Even as automation expands in audit and elsewhere, Jackson is adamant that human professionals remain at the core.
“We are always going to have that human at the center of the experience,” he said. “It brings back the importance of the professional, the judgment, the objectivity that we bring to the role.”
For Jackson, EY’s AI push isn’t just about modernization – it’s about purpose.
“That’s what we are most excited about,” he said. Not only does it lead to better audits, it adds “assurance and confidence to the capital markets, and does so in a way that reinvigorates the excitement that our professionals have when they join an organization like Ernst & Young and they recognize that they’re actually doing something meaningful that’s making a change in the world.”
Be First to Comment