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Delivering AI accountability — and scalability
Executives are rapidly embedding AI into business processes, connecting it to enterprise data and increasingly granting it authority to make decisions and take action. But leaders may not know what an active AI system is authorized to do, what informed its actions or who owns the outcome. The 2026 EY US AI Risk and Governance Survey shows:
41%
41%
of respondents say senior leaders do not have visibility into all AI tools within their organization. And some AI systems may be operating without a complete inventory of where they are active or what actions they can take.
26%
26%
of respondents whose organizations use agentic AI say their organizations cannot detect unauthorized AI agents operating internally. Also, management may know that an agent is active without having a clear view of its authority.
36%
36%
of respondents say their organizations have experienced an AI incident or failure that caused a materially negative impact, including data loss, financial damage, operational disruption or brand damage.
Know Your AI from Ernst & Young LLP helps close these gaps by making authority, controls and accountability visible. It takes the black box of AI and illuminates it from the inside out — delivering transparency, trust and innovation at speed.
What is Know Your AI?
The White House Accord on Super Intelligence has increased attention on controls, monitoring, independent evaluation and board oversight for AI. While commitments in the accord focus on participating frontier model companies, the questions raised are relevant to any enterprise using advanced AI — and the answers can be found through Know Your AI.
Know Your AI is an enterprise discipline for designing trust into AI-enabled decisions. It identifies where AI is operating, defines the authority assigned to it, and preserves the context and evidence behind its actions. It also connects execution to clear decision rights, embedded controls and accountable human owners. It advances AI governance for the agentic age by integrating accountability and control into decisions and workflows rather than reviewing them only after the fact.
It follows a similar logic used in Know Your Customer which helps organizations, particularly in financial services, understand whom they are doing business with and manage the associated risk. Know Your AI extends that principle to AI by helping organizations understand where it is operating, what it is authorized to do and who remains accountable. It preserves the context and evidence surrounding important decisions so management can oversee how AI acts on the organization’s behalf.
Five questions that drive AI accountability
As AI agents gain access to company information and take actions within business processes, organizations need clarity about AI acting on their behalf. Agents create tremendous opportunity while introducing risks that must be understood and managed. To resolve these problems, Know Your AI helps leadership answer five questions about AI acting on behalf of the enterprise:
Creating a decision record for AI accountability
An AI action can affect a customer, change a financial process or create exposure for the business. Understanding the action requires a view of the business process in which it occurred.
Consider an agent that can change a customer record. A complete account should show which agent made the change, whether it had authority to do so, what information informed the action, which controls applied and who owns the outcome.
Together, these answers create a decision record that management can use to reconstruct an AI-enabled action; test whether required controls worked; and adapt safeguards, authority or ownership as conditions change.
Trust in how AI operates: how Know Your AI differs
Know Your AI complements the disciplines already used to manage AI, but it serves a distinct purpose. It gives leadership a business-level account of the AI acting across the enterprise —connecting identity, authority, activity, decision context and accountability.
| AI concept | Role in building trust in AI | How Know Your AI adds value |
|---|---|---|
| AI governance | Establishes policies, roles, risk thresholds and controls for responsible AI development and use | Shows leadership how those expectations apply to the AI systems and decisions operating across the business |
| AI observability | Provides evidence about performance, behavior, events and system health | Connects technical signals to business context so leaders can understand why an action matters and who owns the outcome |
| Know Your Agent | Confirms an individual agent’s identity, permissions, authority and operating constraints | Goes beyond any single agent, encompassing agents, models, embedded AI and third-party services, and the business decisions they affect |
| Know Your AI | Makes AI authority, activity and accountability visible to leadership across the enterprise | Encompasses identity, authority, activity, decision context and accountability in a business-level view |
Applied together, these disciplines give leadership evidence that AI is operating within defined expectations — and a clear path to intervene when it is not. That evidence is what allows trust to be earned and sustained as AI assumes greater responsibility.
Trust also depends on keeping that view current. Models change, new information becomes available and connections to business applications can expand an agent’s reach. Continuous monitoring and review help leadership determine whether AI agents operate within their intended role and whether their authority, controls or safeguards should change.
Know Your AI adds dimensions of trust to how AI is used and governed. Management retains accountability. The board gains a clearer basis for oversight. And the organization can make faster, informed decisions about where AI should assume greater responsibility without losing control.
Why EY: build AI accountability and trust across your business
EY teams bring capabilities across the AI lifecycle. We understand the technology, your company and its goals, and the business environment you operate in. And we bring experience with risk, controls, operating models and organizational accountability.
EY teams can help you identify where AI is active and understand which business decisions it affects. The work can clarify the authority assigned to agents, examine how that authority is governed and improve the information available to leadership. EY teams can also help embed continuous monitoring and review as systems and their operating environments change.
A Know Your AI assessment can give management a clearer view of the current environment and identify where authority, controls or accountability should be strengthened to support responsible AI adoption at scale.
With AI, what you don’t know can hurt you. Know more so that you can do more. EY teams help organizations strengthen AI accountability, build trust through evidence and controls, and scale AI responsibly.
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