Moving Beyond the GRC Mindset - Why Boards Must Rethink Risk for the AI Era
I’m often questioned—sometimes challenged and occasionally attacked—by professionals who are deeply invested in traditional Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) approaches. For many, GRC isn’t just a framework or a set of tools—it’s an identity, a career foundation, and in many cases, a commercial interest. So when I suggest that risk management must evolve beyond legacy GRC models, I’m not just raising a strategic argument—I’m challenging a belief system.
But this is not about abandoning GRC. It’s about recognizing that GRC, in its traditional, siloed, compliance-first form, is no longer sufficient for today’s risk environment.
And nowhere is that more visible than in Internal Audit—a function that illustrates a much broader issue: the failure of risk management to keep pace with the speed, scale, and interconnectedness of today’s digital and AI-driven risks.
Internal Audit Is a Symptom of a Larger Governance Problem
Internal Audit was once a dependable second responder—arriving after risks had played out, validating controls, and documenting compliance. That approach worked when risks were linear, bounded, and relatively slow-moving. But those conditions no longer exist.
Today, risk is systemic. AI models update themselves in real time. Cyberattacks propagate across continents in seconds. Regulatory environments shift monthly. Meanwhile, Internal Audit often remains stuck in manual workflows, operating through retrospective sampling, and reliant on legacy GRC technology that wasn’t built for this era.
But Internal Audit’s struggle is not unique. It reflects a much larger challenge across the entire risk management discipline: a misalignment between traditional risk structures and modern risk realities.
The Legacy GRC Model: Outdated and Outpaced
Traditional GRC platforms and programs were developed to solve a narrow problem—how to ensure compliance with known regulations. They offered structured controls, documentation capabilities, and audit trails. But they were never designed to:
Predict emerging threats
Monitor AI model drift
Govern decentralized cloud environments
Integrate risk insights into strategic decision-making
The KPMG Risk & Resilience Survey (March 2025) confirms this disconnect:
71% of organizations report fragmented, siloed risk management practices
66% cite inadequate resources and cultural barriers
Only 64% link risk data to business strategy
These aren’t just audit issues. They are enterprise-wide governance failures that stem from over-reliance on legacy GRC thinking.
The IRM Navigator™ Framework: A Modern Governance Architecture
The framework encompasses four interconnected risk domains that reflect how organizations actually operate today.
What’s needed is not a rejection of GRC—but its transformation into something broader, more integrated, and responsive. That’s the purpose of the IRM Navigator™ Framework, developed by Wheelhouse Advisors.
The framework encompasses four interconnected risk domains that reflect how organizations actually operate today:
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) – Aligns strategic risk with board-level objectives
Operational Risk Management (ORM) – Focuses on supply chain, process, and people risk
Technology Risk Management (TRM) – Covers AI governance, cybersecurity, and IT resilience
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) – Ensures regulatory alignment as part of a larger system
The power of the IRM Navigator™ Framework lies in how it unifies these functions, enabling real-time risk visibility, predictive intelligence, and faster decision-making. It doesn’t diminish the value of GRC—it puts it in context.
Research-Backed Urgency: The Rise of Technology Risk
The need for this integrated approach is reinforced by the findings of the 2025 IRM Navigator™ TRM Report:
The IRM market is projected to grow from $61.6 billion to $134 billion by 2032
Technology Risk Management (TRM) is leading that growth, at 12.9% CAGR
62% of enterprises are investing in AI-powered security automation
Regulatory pressure from the SEC, NIS2, and GDPR is accelerating demand for automated compliance and AI governance
This is not academic. Risk leaders are being asked to govern AI deployments, assess algorithmic bias, monitor digital supply chains, and comply with evolving cyber regulations—all in real time. The legacy GRC stack was never built for this.
Why Boards Must Lead the Mindset Shift
Boards and executive teams must understand that GRC is no longer the ceiling—it’s the floor. It’s where risk oversight begins, not where it ends. If organizations continue to rely solely on compliance-oriented frameworks and legacy technology, they will fall further behind, both in resilience and in trust.
Here’s what the shift requires:
Equipping Internal Audit and risk functions with IRM technology, enabling predictive monitoring and strategic insight
Breaking down silos across ERM, ORM, TRM, and GRC, ensuring a unified view of risk
Embedding the IRM Navigator™ Framework across business functions, not just within compliance and audit
And most importantly, it requires changing the mental model—seeing risk not as a constraint to manage, but as a force to navigate, anticipate, and leverage.
Final Thought: The Discipline Must Evolve
The friction I encounter when discussing this evolution is understandable—but it’s also telling. It reveals that many risk professionals have been trained to think narrowly, to defend frameworks rather than adapt them, and to value process over outcome.
But the environment has changed.
Risk management, as a discipline, must become faster, smarter, and more integrated. We must move from compliance to consequence management, from reporting to foresight, and from static frameworks to adaptive strategies.
The IRM Navigator™ Framework offers a path forward. But the first step is admitting that the traditional path is no longer enough.
Further Reading & Resources
Bridging the Resilience Gap, The RiskTech Journal, March 2025
KPMG Risk & Resilience Survey, March 2025
EY: How Internal Audit Can Govern AI Risks and Promote Compliance, March 2025
