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Trusted AI that helps organizations scale with confidence
Enterprise AI governance embeds trust into AI-enabled decisions, accelerating adoption, resilience and value.
Building a secure digital future starts with trust
This Cyber Awareness Month, EY highlights how cyber leaders serve as architects of trust, embedding security, transparency and accountability into every stage of the digital journey to help organizations innovate faster and create lasting value.
Read the latest AI Pulse Report featuring Ganesh Devarajan’s perspective on scaling AI while maintaining control and reducing risk.
In the AI era, innovation moves faster than ever — and so does disruption. Geopolitical shifts, cyber threats, regulatory change and autonomous AI systems create constant pressure to make decisions with greater speed and confidence. Organizations with Trusted AI can move at the speed of trust — acting decisively, adapting more quickly and building resilience into how they operate.
Trust is a critical condition for realizing enterprise value from AI. It separates those that innovate and transform from those constrained by uncertainty. As AI agents take on more work and more decisions, hesitation becomes increasingly expensive and may lead to an overall loss of competitive advantage. In addition, trust provides the confidence to act during periods of disruption, making resilience an outcome of better decisions rather than a defensive response.
Trust in an unpredictable risk environment
73%
73%
of organizations say they aren’t fully prepared for this unpredictable risk environment, according to EY Global Risk Transformation research.
What is Trusted AI?
Trusted AI is not a stand-alone capability or a governance program. It is the outcome created when organizations can demonstrate that AI-enabled decisions are:
- Governed
- Secure
- Explainable
- Observable
- Accountable
- Aligned with business objectives
Enterprise AI governance is one of the operating models that helps make these outcomes possible by defining how AI-enabled decisions are owned, controlled, monitored and improved.
Instead of seeing speed and safety at odds with one another, trust can be engineered into the architecture of AI through governance by design. With this approach, organizations can innovate responsibly while moving at the speed and scale of AI-enabled decision-making, underpinning the confidence that AI-enabled decisions can be made, monitored and improved responsibly.
Governance is an accelerator in the AI era, not a brake.
Ganesh Devarajan
EY Americas Consulting Cyber Risk Practice Leader
How enterprise AI governance enables Trusted AI
Trusted AI is not created by any one function. It depends on responsible AI, cybersecurity, risk management, data governance and compliance working together as a system.
EY.ai for Risk helps organizations turn Trusted AI into an enterprise capability by bringing together risk, controls, cyber, data governance, compliance and responsible AI. It supports the operating model, oversight and control environment needed to identify AI-related risks, embed accountability and scale AI with confidence.
Trust becomes real inside the workflow, where decisions are made, monitored and improved. This allows organizations to move faster with confidence while maintaining accountability and control. This is what enables Trusted AI to scale.
EY.ai Value Blueprints help organizations translate Trusted AI into use-case-level action. They connect priority AI use cases to the governance, controls, data, cyber and risk capabilities needed to scale responsibly, helping organizations identify where trust should be designed into workflows, how controls should be embedded and how value can be measured as adoption expands.
Why Trusted AI is a competitive advantage
Trust is more than a governance objective. It is a business asset that enables organizations to adopt AI faster, scale innovation responsibly and build resilience in an increasingly uncertain environment. Organizations that embed trust into AI-enabled decisions spend less time managing hesitation and more time acting on opportunity. They can move at the speed of trust.
AI governance models built for human-centered approval cycles can slam the brakes on progress. Organizations create additional reviews, approvals and layers upon layers of manual checkpoints to compensate for uncertainty. This slows progress and limits the enterprise value AI is meant to deliver.
Trust is earned with built-in governance, not bolted on
Traditional governance models were designed around oversight after decisions are made. But with AI agents, organizations need AI agent governance that defines autonomy limits, permissions, escalation triggers, auditability and reversibility before those decisions occur. Organizations must evolve past a bolted-on approach so that governance operates at the speed of decision-making.
Instead, trust must be considered a design requirement for governance, with controls embedded directly into workflows, decision logic, operating models and system architecture. In some cases, this may include compliance-as-code approaches that translate policies and requirements into machine-readable rules.
Control must extend to how decisions are formed.
Prashant Karanam
EY Global Internal Controls Leader
Defining an AI governance operating model relies on activities such as:
- Mapping AI-enabled decisions and risk points
- Embedding AI controls and guardrails into workflows and platforms
- Establishing AI governance monitoring, escalation and accountability mechanisms
- Developing real-time visibility into agent identities, permissions, dependencies and execution paths
- Aligning cyber, risk, data governance, responsible AI and compliance
Human oversight and escalation in AI-enabled decisions
While AI can automate activities and augment decisions, accountability remains human. Governance should clearly define how human judgment guides, supervises and governs machine-enabled decisions. In a thoughtfully designed governance model, humans are not in the loop on every decision — rather, they are on the loop, in the control plane. In this model, rather than manually approving every AI-enabled decision and output, humans define the governance structure and oversee ownership, decision rights, risk thresholds, escalation paths, supervision and responsible intervention when human input is required.
The traditional view of ‘humans in the loop’ acts as a bottleneck. We need to be thinking about humans on the loop.
George Haggar
EY USLI Consulting Risk Leader
How governance can strengthen resilience and trust
Rather than simply reacting to disruption, organizations with trust built in can proactively respond and innovate while maintaining confidence in their operations, data and decision-making systems.
Companies with mature trust capabilities gain:
- Greater velocity in decision cycles and approvals
- More efficient review and escalation processes
- Accelerated AI adoption and utilization rates
- Increased governance policy compliance and control effectiveness
- Metrics for explainability, traceability and auditability
- Cyber resilience and operational continuity indicators
- Stakeholder confidence and regulatory readiness
For businesses, trust is now key to AI success.
Traci Gusher
EY Americas AI and Data Leader
In other words, trust becomes a strategic asset that can be measured, strengthened and scaled through existing business and operational key performance indicators (KPIs). Organizations with built-in trust and AI governance are equipped with a source of competitive differentiation — for scaling decision-making, strengthening resilience and unlocking the full value of AI-powered transformation.
How EY can help
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AI adoption requires trust, governance and responsibility and technical capabilities like guardrails, monitoring, thresholding and evidence capture. Learn more.
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The EY Enterprise Resilience solution helps organizations navigate disruption with agility — reducing risk and driving long-term value. Learn more.
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Discover how EY's risk consulting team can help your organization embrace disruption and turn risk into a competitive advantage.
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The EY Cyber Incident Resilience and Response solution provides ongoing incident management and uplift services across business lines. Learn more.
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AI boosts business but presents challenges. A Responsible AI framework allows leaders to harness its transformative potential while mitigating risks.
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See how EY Integrated Solutions help organizations accelerate transformation, improve resilience and unlock enterprise value with AI.
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