Global AI Firm AURÄI Unveils Platform for Monitoring, Governing AI
A global enterprise AI assurance firm, AURÄI, has launched at the 30th anniversary conference of the ISACA Lagos Chapter, with a platform designed to help businesses monitor, govern and certify their AI operations as adoption outpaces oversight.
The launch was announced on Friday during Day 2 of the conference at Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos, where founder and CEO Olayinka James warned that enterprises are running AI systems that touch customers, employees and critical decisions without adequate governance.
Olayinka told auditors, risk leaders and cybersecurity professionals that while 88% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function and 93% of internal audit functions use AI in some form, only 38% of audit teams have a strategy for it. He added that just 38% of organisations have a comprehensive policy for the AI tools their staff already use.
According to the AI governance industry leader, a typical enterprise now runs more than 150 AI tools that its IT team has never seen.
“Adoption everywhere. Assurance almost nowhere,” he said. “Our banks run models for credit and fraud today. Our fintechs ship on foundation models faster than policy can read them. Our agencies pilot systems that touch citizens directly.”
From recording decisions to making them
AURÄI, co-founded by Olayinka James, Mohammed Mijindadi and Chris Kanwei, is building what it describes as a global enterprise system to close that gap.
Olayinka said the current moment mirrors the early 2000s cycle of Adoption, Reckoning, Regulation and the birth of a new profession. Then, the late-1990s adoption of ERP systems and electronic ledgers was followed by the collapse of Enron and WorldCom in 2001 and 2002 and the disappearance of audit giant Arthur Andersen, leading to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which forced executives to certify controls and created the IT auditor and the CISA certification.
“This time the machines are not recording the decisions. They are making them — credit, claims, benefits, identity — at machine speed and population scale,” he said.
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He cited Summer 2026 as AI’s reckoning period — about 1,200 AI agents linked to a breach of Hugging Face in July, a two-week pause in reinforcement learning development by OpenAI in August, the public resignation of an Anthropic researcher, Google’s Gemini escaping a test sandbox into three real companies, a breach of Australia’s Medicare portal, and a rapid regulatory response including California’s SB 813 and AB 1405 mandating independent AI auditors and a state registry, the White House Accord committing frontier labs to independent external auditors and board oversight, and 12 additional AI laws signed in California on 1 October.
If it took ten months from Enron’s collapse to Sarbanes-Oxley, he noted, this time it took about seven weeks — a shift he called the “AI SOX moment” that will mint a new profession: the AI assurance professional.
How AURÄI works
AURÄI says it combines AI agents that automate governance, risk and compliance activities with trained professionals who oversee their work.
The platform supports AI system discovery, evidence collection, control testing, policy drafting and audit documentation. Its agents operate within defined boundaries and record their actions, while certified professionals review outputs, challenge findings and sign off on critical decisions.
“AI agents should escalate to human judgement instead of guessing,” Olayinka said.
Alongside the platform, AURÄI trains and certifies professionals to operate its agents and oversee their execution, reflecting what Olayinka described as a changing workforce requirement.
“AI will not take your job. Someone who mastered it will.”
The model, he said, was born from a recurring problem he observed across more than 20 years in enterprise audit and cybersecurity roles at Deloitte, PwC, Citigroup, GE Digital and Zimmer Biomet, where he previously served as Chief Information Security Officer and Global Head of IT Audit: organisations had sound frameworks but struggled to implement them efficiently.
“The same pattern repeated everywhere: the frameworks were sound, the execution was broken.”
Why it matters
For enterprises, weak AI oversight creates operational, financial and reputational risks, particularly in industries where automated decisions affect customers and employees.
With regulations such as the EU AI Act introducing requirements around risk management, transparency and human oversight, organisations need practical ways to demonstrate that their AI systems are appropriately governed.
AURÄI aims to help them produce that evidence for internal assurance teams, external auditors, regulators and boards.
The company is led by three co-founders with experience spanning audit, infrastructure and institutional investment.
