The article, AI ‘hesitancy’, ‘dangerous pathways’ and rising expectations of risk officers, contrasts the ‘boardroom hesitancy’ reported by Cisco and the Governance Institute of Australia with IBRS’s view that the root cause is historical ‘governance debt’.
Dr Sweeney argues that this hesitancy is a symptom of a failure in technology governance that began well before the AI boom. The rush to deploy collaboration tools during the pandemic created ‘sprawling information messes’, resulting in legacy debt that is now compounding and creating dangerous pathways for unmanaged AI access. Unlike self-selecting survey data, IBRS’s insights are derived from actual observed client behaviour, which indicates that governance remains reactive and structurally underpowered.
Looking forward, Dr Sweeney advises that risk officers must pivot from a narrow compliance focus to a strategic understanding of the stochastic nature of generative AI. The pressing challenge for organisations in 2025 will be the market shift from ‘agentic hype’ to true ‘orchestration’, embedded AI workflows that require deep financial and information governance, not just technical checks.
