Your GRC team isn’t resisting AI. They’re waiting for a version of it they can actually defend.
That’s the headline from our survey of GRC practitioners: the appetite is there, but trust and fragmentation are keeping AI stuck in pilot mode. Nearly half of teams (44.4%) are still experimenting, and only 13.5% have AI running across their workflows.
It’s not hard to see why. Practitioners are still losing their weeks to the same repeatable work — evidence collection, documentation, risk assessments, third-party reviews — scattered across disconnected systems. And the two biggest things standing between them and trusting AI with any of it? Data privacy and accuracy. GRC teams need AI they can defend to an auditor, not just AI they can access.
This report benchmarks where GRC really stands on AI in 2026 — what’s working, what’s stalling and what practitioners say it would take to move from experimentation to trusted, everyday use.
Inside the Report:
- Where AI adoption actually sits today, and why so many programs are stuck between “pilot” and “embedded”
- The manual work quietly eroding your team’s week (and the nearly 70% who say that’s exactly where AI should start)
- Why AI ROI is “underdeveloped, not absent” — and the operational metrics that surface value first
- Five moves to get from AI experimentation to trusted GRC execution