Agentic GRC and the Limits of AI, with Ian Yip and Jack Hedges

Governance, risk and compliance generates a great deal of manual work, and not all of it is work anyone would miss. Ian Yip's argument is that this is exactly where AI earns its place in a security team, provided nobody mistakes it for judgment.

Ian is the founder and CEO of Avertro, the company behind the cyber and AI governance platform CyberHQ, and he recently delivered a standing room only session on agentic GRC at Infosecurity Europe in London. He joins David Savva-Willett along with Jack Hedges, a strategic account executive at Avertro who works with security leaders across Australia.

Ian sets out a way of thinking rather than a technology: build an agentic team the way you would build a human one, as an org chart of narrow specialists that collaborate, because models do their best work when given one task rather than many. Chained together and scheduled, that team absorbs the evidence collection, the framework crosswalks and the board reporting, leaving the humans the work they would rather be doing.

What cannot be delegated is taste, which Ian describes as the ability to look at what a model hands back and know what to strip away. The conversation covers how much of GRC is theatre and which of that is still necessary for auditability, why he believes everyone is now a builder, what European regulators do differently and why their real effect is on budgets rather than behaviour, and Jack's view from the field, where a lack of visibility over what staff are already using has overtaken cyber GRC as the pressing concern.