From AI ambition to AI control: Governing AI in practice

On Wednesday, 7 October 2026, KPMG and OneTrust held an executive roundtable focused on what AI governance looks like in practice. The aim was to move beyond policy discussions and consider how to create visibility, clarify ownership, and apply controls that can scale with the business. Below we explore key insights from this exclusive event.

Organizations have spent the last years building AI principles, policies, approval processes, and risk assessments. While these foundations remain important, they were designed for a world where AI was developed by a limited number of specialists and governed through periodic reviews. Today, AI is embedded across enterprise applications, business processes, and increasingly autonomous agents, making traditional governance models difficult to scale.

What we explored during the session:

Why existing governance approaches often struggle as AI moves into production;
How organizations are creating better visibility across AI use cases, vendors, copilots, and agents;
What continuous governance looks like beyond one-off assessments; and
How privacy, data, risk, and technology leaders are working together to make governance more operational.

The aim was simple: to share practical ideas and approaches that participants could take back to their organizations and put into practice.

Benoit Watteyne

Partner | Advisory

KPMG in Belgium

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Three challenges to focus on

As AI adoption accelerates, organizations face three fundamental governance challenges: visibility, volume, and complexity.

Visibility

Organizations cannot govern what they cannot see. AI discovery, inventories, and structured intake processes are becoming critical capabilities.

Volume

The number of AI use cases is growing faster than organizations can review manually. Effective governance requires risk-based processes, automation, reusable control patterns, and targeted expert oversight.

Complexity

AI solutions are becoming more diverse, ranging from predictive models to generative AI and autonomous agents. This requires organizations to move beyond policies and point-in-time approvals toward continuous monitoring, testing, auditability, and evidence-based assurance.

How to drive the AI governance shift your organization needs

Together, these challenges are driving a shift from traditional governance models toward continuous, operational governance that can keep pace with AI adoption and innovation. This evolution also changes the role of governance functions and the second line. Rather than acting primarily as reviewers and challengers of risk, they increasingly become enablers of responsible innovation and value creation.

Technology plays a critical role in scaling AI governance. OneTrust AI Governance operationalizes the KPMG Trusted AI Framework by automating AI discovery and bringing AI inventories, risk assessments, controls, monitoring, and governance evidence together in a single platform. The result is a shift from static governance processes to continuous, evidence-driven oversight that enables organizations to innovate with confidence while meeting regulatory expectations.

The AI Omnibus extends the implementation grace period, but not the objectives. Organizations should use this time to strengthen inventories, ownership structures, testing capabilities, monitoring processes, and evidence trails. For financial institutions, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) can serve as the operational backbone, enabling a single evidence set to support regulatory requirements and supervisory scrutiny.

How KPMG can help

The future of AI governance lies in moving from governance by design to governance in operation. Organizations that combine the KPMG Trusted AI Framework with technology-enabled governance will be better positioned to maintain visibility, scale AI adoption responsibly, and demonstrate that controls operate effectively in practice. Reach out to your KPMG experts to guide you through this entire process.

Governing AI in practice - Presentation slides

Get access to the presentation slides from our exclusive roundtable with KPMG and OneTrust. Explore how to move from governance by design to governance in operation and get in touch with your KPMG experts to guide you through this entire process.

Download the slides