Global enterprise AI assurance firm AURÄI has launched with a platform designed to help organisations monitor, govern, and certify their AI operations, debuting at the 30th anniversary conference of the ISACA Lagos Chapter as AI adoption outpaces oversight worldwide.

The launch was announced on Friday during Day 2 of the conference, held at the Oriental Hotel in Victoria Island, Lagos. ISACA is the global professional association for IT audit, governance, risk, and security professionals, and the body that administers the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) certification. Founder and CEO Olayinka James told an audience of auditors, risk leaders, and cybersecurity professionals that enterprises are running AI systems that touch customers, employees, and critical decisions without adequate governance.

Governance Gap Widens as Adoption Accelerates

Citing figures on the state of enterprise AI, James noted that while 88% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function and 93% of internal audit functions use the technology in some form, only 38% of audit teams have a strategy for it. He added that just 38% of organisations maintain a comprehensive policy covering the AI tools their staff already use.

According to James, a typical enterprise now runs more than 150 AI tools that its IT team has never seen — the kind of unmanaged footprint practitioners call shadow AI, in which tools adopted inside business units escape central IT and risk review.

"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 James alongside Mohammed Mijindadi and Chris Kanwei, is building what it describes as a global enterprise system to close that gap.

James said the current moment mirrors the early-2000s cycle of adoption, reckoning, regulation, and the birth of a new profession. In that era, the late-1990s adoption of ERP systems and electronic ledgers was followed by the collapses of Enron and WorldCom in 2001 and 2002 and the disappearance of audit giant Arthur Andersen — ultimately producing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which forced executives to certify controls and gave rise to 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.

He characterised the summer of 2026 as AI's reckoning period, pointing to about 1,200 AI agents linked to a breach of Hugging Face, the widely used open-source platform for AI models and datasets, 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; and a breach of Australia's Medicare portal.

The regulatory response, he said, was rapid: California's SB 813 and AB 1405 mandating independent AI auditors and a state registry; a 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, James noted, the equivalent cycle this time took about seven weeks — a shift he called the "AI SOX moment" that will mint a new profession: the AI assurance professional.

How the Platform Works

AURÄI 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," James said.

Alongside the platform, the company trains and certifies professionals to operate its agents and oversee their execution — a reflection, James said, of a changing workforce requirement. "AI will not take your job. Someone who mastered it will."

The model grew out of a recurring problem James 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," he said.

Why Enterprise Oversight 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 — the European Union's risk-based framework for AI systems — 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.

Near-term markers to watch include how requirements such as California's independent AI auditor mandates and the White House Accord's commitments to independent external auditors and board oversight are implemented, and how quickly enterprises move AI governance from policy documents to tested, evidenced controls.

Founders Drawn From Audit, Infrastructure, and Investment

The company is led by three co-founders with experience spanning audit, infrastructure, and institutional investment.

James, AURÄI's founder and chief executive officer, brings more than 20 years of experience across enterprise audit, cybersecurity, information security leadership, and governance at organisations including Deloitte, PwC, Citigroup, GE Digital, and Zimmer Biomet. At Zimmer Biomet, he served as Chief Information Security Officer and Global Head of IT Audit, where his work included improving audit preparation and reducing audit exceptions.

Mijindadi, co-founder and chief commercial officer, is the founder of Africa Infrastructure Solutions Ltd (AISL), a former President of GE Nigeria, and a former Managing Director of GE Vernova Gas Power West Africa. He has negotiated more than $1 billion in infrastructure agreements with five African governments and leads commercial expansion and enterprise partnerships at AURÄI. His earlier career included leadership positions at GE Transportation and GE Gas Power Systems, following a start in engineering and construction with Julius Berger Nigeria and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority before moving into commercial, strategic, and executive leadership.

Kanwei, co-founder and chief financial officer, is the founder of RealCorp Capital and a former institutional investor at Aviva and Morgan Stanley covering EMEA. He brings expertise in institutional capital, risk, and cross-border investment, and leads finance and capital strategy at AURÄI. He is also an ecosystem builder and community leader who writes about African ventures, investment, and diaspora capital.

Through AURÄI, the three founders are pursuing a broader vision of combining AI-powered enterprise governance with the training and certification of professionals capable of overseeing its execution. The company is now expanding its engagement with enterprise customers and design partners, inviting banks, fintechs, consulting firms, and other organisations that build or use AI to explore its platform through a demo and waitlist at