GRC 7.0 – GRC Orchestrate
Agentic AI, Digital Twins, and the Enterprise-Wide Command Center for GRC: Objectives, Uncertainty, and Integrity
In the 2025 State of the GRC Market: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GRC Galaxy, we’ll explore how these ideas are transforming both vendor landscapes and enterprise architectures.
The world of Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance is shifting toward orchestration: a continuous, intelligent alignment of decisions, data, and direction across the entire enterprise. Welcome to GRC 7.0 – GRC Orchestrate: the convergence of agile infrastructure, cognitive intelligence, and business integration into a unified operational model. This is not merely a technological trend. It is the systemic evolution of how organizations pursue objectives, navigate uncertainty, and act with integrity.
Importantly, the concept of GRC Orchestrate has roots not in hype, but in visionary groundwork. Over five years ago, I collaborated with Ian Hollowbread, then Chief Operating Officer for Digital Innovation at ING and Head of ING Labs. Ian coined the term GRC Orchestrate and led pioneering work to build a cohesive model where governance, risk management, and compliance, particularly in a RegTech context, were no longer fragmented, but orchestrated throughout the organization and its operations. Even before today’s AI gold rush, Ian envisioned a future in which regulatory obligations, risk signals, and business decisions flowed seamlessly through a unified digital architecture: an early vision now being realized.
Real-world implementations are bringing this vision to life. I recently saw this vividly illustrated in EY Germany’s One Governance framework, which offers a modular, federated, and objective-aligned governance architecture. Their approach intelligently integrates domains such as performance management, risk, internal control, compliance, resilience, and sustainability through a shared platform model. With its ontological rigor, digital twin enablement, and data-driven design, One Governance is a tangible embodiment of what GRC Orchestrate aspires to deliver: integrated oversight, real-time coordination, and contextual governance across every layer of the enterprise. It uses the power of a performance management system combined with its ability to integrate, – automate and reconfigure itself. Like a Hydra who grows a new head when one is cut off!
G: Governance – Setting, Steering, and Achieving Business Objectives
At its core, governance is about defining direction and ensuring the organization stays on course, not just through oversight, but through active alignment with strategic objectives. In the GRC Orchestrate model, governance becomes a continuously monitored and dynamically adjusted capability embedded in software: always-on, adaptive, and linked to business performance.
Boards are no longer waiting for quarterly dashboards. They are engaging with live, interactive systems that model objectives, track performance indicators, and simulate decision paths. They interact with live, intelligent systems that continuously model objectives, measure performance, and adapt pathways.
Agentic AI empowers this new governance. What one collaborator playfully called “Squids” for their digital tentacles that act on behalf of governance functions to monitor objective progress, flag deviations, and recommend corrective actions. For example, in a multinational bank expanding into new markets, governance agents track whether ESG, compliance, and financial objectives are progressing in sync. They identify gaps between corporate intent and local execution, triggering policy refinement, stakeholder engagement, or investment recalibration.
Think of it like high-frequency strategic governance: where agents don’t just report but act, simulate, and refine. In a multinational bank, for example, these agents assess ESG, financial, and compliance progress in real-time, recommending actions when strategic objectives drift from execution.
At the heart of this system are Digital Governance Twins: virtual models of an organization’s governance architecture, including policies, committees, mandates, legal entities, and lines of accountability. These twins support scenario modeling, such as evaluating what happens to governance coverage if the organization restructures or divests a business unit. The governance layer is also federated: global objectives and governance mandates cascade into local adaptations while maintaining traceability.
GRC Orchestrate Contexts for Governance:
- Governance is the process of setting, steering, and achieving enterprise objectives.
- GRC Orchestrate transforms governance from static oversight into a dynamic, agent-supported capability.
- Digital Governance Twins model real-world governance structures, enabling simulation and proactive steering.
- Agentic systems track performance across objectives and trigger governance interventions when necessary.
- Federated policy governance enables global alignment with local adaptability, reducing policy drift.
R: Risk – Navigating the Uncertainty That Affects Objectives
Risk is not about what might go wrong in the abstract. Risk is the effect of uncertainty — both threats and opportunities — on the achievement of objectives. This framing is critical: GRC 7.0 does not see risk merely as negative events to avoid but as dynamic uncertainty to model, simulate, and leverage.
In GRC 7.0, risk management becomes a live, interconnected, and agent-driven process that is deeply tied to business performance. Risk is evaluated in the context of what the organization is trying to achieve, and continuously assessed as new data, decisions, and disruptions emerge
GRC Orchestrate leverages Agentic AI to monitor internal operations, external environments, and cross-functional dependencies. These agents scan for leading risk indicators, regulatory shifts, market disruptions, and operational anomalies. They perform real-time analysis, conduct simulations, and propose mitigations tailored to specific objectives. This marks a shift from reactive risk registers to objective-centric risk modeling.
With GRC Orchestrate, Agentic AI continuously scans signals across the enterprise: operations, suppliers, regulations, markets. These agents detect patterns, simulate outcomes, and adapt risk responses in real-time. Enabling the organization to “see around corners.” This is a clear break from passive risk registers.
We are entering the realm risk management in strategic decision making and objective-centric risk modeling: where risk data is embedded into decision architectures and dynamically optimized. These are elements that have been in the scope of the definition of GRC going back to the first version of the OCEG GRC Capability Model in 2003, but technology for GRC has not fully delivered in the past.
GRC Orchestrate Contexts for Risk Management:
- Risk is defined as the uncertainty that can affect the achievement of objectives.
- GRC Orchestrate uses agentic AI to proactively monitor risk across internal and external dimensions.
- Objective-centric modeling ties every risk to a strategic, operational, or tactical goal.
- Digital Risk Twins simulate risk impact and support resilience testing across business units.
- Risk becomes a value enabler—integrated into capital planning, innovation, and performance steering.
C: Compliance – Acting with Integrity Across Obligations and Expectations
Compliance in GRC 7.0 is not about box-checking or regulatory fire drills. It is about ensuring the organization acts with integrity, upholding internal values and honoring external obligations. GRC Orchestrate redefines compliance as an embedded and predictive assurance function. It continuously aligns internal policies, training, controls, and records with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.
Agentic compliance systems monitor changes to laws, standards, and stakeholder expectations. When a new law (e.g., EU AI Act or Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) is passed, agents immediately map the new obligations to affected policies, systems, third-party contracts, and roles within the organization. Gaps are flagged, controls are updated, and relevant personnel are notified—with all actions logged for audit and regulatory review
Yes, compliance agents still interpret laws, monitor obligations, and ensure documentation. But that’s AI Stage 1. In Stage 2 and beyond, compliance becomes predictive, adaptive, and strategic. For instance, an agent could ingest global news about lithium battery incidents, anticipate future regulatory shifts across markets, and recommend adjustments to supply chains before any laws are passed.
Compliance assurance is no longer episodic. It is continuous. Evidence of control effectiveness is gathered in real time through automated monitoring. Compliance AI agents also validate attestations, execute testing protocols, and maintain audit-ready documentation. Integrity is not a campaign: it is operationalized through orchestrated workflows and embedded intelligence.
Take this further: imagine a system where a service contract is ingested, its SLA obligations extracted, metrics connected, workflows created, and actions (like payment blocking) triggered automatically upon breach. No human configuration. The system generates live code based on context. This is not science fiction, it is self-evolving GRC.
This is compliance-as-strategy. We move beyond alerts and attestations toward systems that guide long-term strategic choices, from divestment to product redesign, based on evolving legal and ethical landscapes.
GRC Orchestrate Contexts for Compliance:
- Compliance is about acting with integrity—honoring legal, ethical, and stakeholder commitments.
- Compliance agents continuously interpret new regulations and align internal systems accordingly.
- Obligations are mapped to controls, policies, and evidence in real time, enabling continuous assurance.
- Digital compliance twins model the integrity of the organization’s control environment.
- Predictive compliance reduces regulatory exposure, audit fatigue, and ethical blind spots.
Infrastructure: Ontologies, Twins, and Intelligent Systems
Behind GRC Orchestrate is a robust semantic and operational foundation. It begins with a shared GRC Ontology: a machine-readable structure that defines how governance, risk, and compliance concepts are related. Obligations, risks, controls, policies, processes, entities, and data are not isolated elements, they are interconnected nodes in a contextual map.
This ontology powers Digital Twins of the enterprise: governance twins, risk twins, and compliance twins. These twins are updated in real time and support intelligent simulations, performance forecasting, and assurance scenario modeling. For example, a risk twin might simulate what happens to supply chain resilience if a key vendor fails due to sanctions or ESG violations.
Agentic systems operate within these twins. Each agent follows a defined observe-analyze-act-escalate loop: autonomously processing input, recommending actions, executing tasks within thresholds, and escalating when necessary. All actions are governed by internal rules, ethics frameworks, and audit traceability.
GRC Orchestrate Contexts for Infrastructure & GRC:
- A shared GRC ontology creates semantic consistency across governance, risk, and compliance data.
- Digital twins simulate the current and future state of enterprise GRC capability.
- Agentic AI workflows bring autonomy to risk sensing, compliance testing, and governance monitoring.
- All orchestration is bounded by internal ethics, audit trails, and access controls.
- This infrastructure transforms GRC from function to fabric—a dynamic layer embedded in business execution.
Final Reflection: Orchestrating Integrity, Intelligence, and Impact
The evolution to GRC 7.0 is more than just another phase, it is a structural transformation. The idea that Ian Hollowbread initiated in ING Labs — a single orchestrated platform for governance, risk management, and compliance — is now fully realizable through today’s technologies. And we are already seeing signs of this vision coming to life in real-world implementations. EY Germany’s One Governance framework is an exemplary case. It integrates ISO 31000, COSO, and other global standards into a federated, modular framework with digital twin support, policy lifecycle orchestration, and intelligent GRC services spanning internal control, ESG, resilience, and responsible AI. One Governance is not just a methodology—it is GRC orchestration in action.
This convergence of agentic AI, digital twins, and GRC ontologies is giving rise to systems that learn, adapt, and grow: like living organisms. We are nearing a time when GRC systems behave like a hydra: reconfiguring, regenerating, and redirecting themselves based on context.
This enables GRC where:
- Governance is about setting and achieving business objectives.
- Risk is the uncertainty that affects those objectives.
- Compliance is acting with integrity in pursuit of them.
GRC Orchestrate is the operational system that makes this alignment tangible, real-time, and scalable. It bridges the strategic with the operational, the intentional with the intelligent, and the ethical with the executable.
In the 2025 State of the GRC Market: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GRC Galaxy, we will expand further on this theme—particularly how digital twins and ontological data models are transforming not just how we manage GRC, but how we design resilient, adaptive organizations.
GRC Orchestrate isn’t just the future. It’s what the bold are building now.