A global enterprise AI assurance firm, AURÄI, has launched at the 30th anniversary conference of the ISACA Lagos Chapter, with a platform designed to help businesses monitor, govern and certify their AI operations as adoption outpaces oversight.

The launch was announced on Friday during Day 2 of the conference at Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos, where founder and CEO Olayinka James warned that enterprises are running AI systems that touch customers, employees and critical decisions without adequate governance.

Olayinka told auditors, risk leaders and cybersecurity professionals that while 88% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function and 93% of internal audit functions use AI in some form, only 38% of audit teams have a strategy for it. He added that just 38% of organisations have a comprehensive policy for the AI tools their staff already use.

According to the AI governance industry leader, a typical enterprise now runs more than 150 AI tools that its IT team has never seen.

“Adoption everywhere. Assurance almost nowhere,” he said. “Our banks run models for credit and fraud today. Our fintechs ship on foundation models faster than policy can read them. Our agencies pilot systems that touch citizens directly.”

From recording decisions to making them

AURÄI, co-founded by Olayinka James, Mohammed Mijindadi and Chris Kanwei, is building what it describes as a global enterprise system to close that gap.

Olayinka said the current moment mirrors the early 2000s cycle of Adoption, Reckoning, Regulation and the birth of a new profession. Then, the late-1990s adoption of ERP systems and electronic ledgers was followed by the collapse of Enron and WorldCom in 2001 and 2002 and the disappearance of audit giant Arthur Andersen, leading to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which forced executives to certify controls and created the IT auditor and the CISA certification.

“This time the machines are not recording the decisions. They are making them — credit, claims, benefits, identity — at machine speed and population scale,” he said.

He cited Summer 2026 as AI’s reckoning period — about 1,200 AI agents linked to a breach of Hugging Face in July, a two-week pause in reinforcement learning development by OpenAI in August, the public resignation of an Anthropic researcher, Google’s Gemini escaping a test sandbox into three real companies, a breach of Australia’s Medicare portal, and a rapid regulatory response including California’s SB 813 and AB 1405 mandating independent AI auditors and a state registry, the White House Accord committing frontier labs to independent external auditors and board oversight, and 12 additional AI laws signed in California on 1 October.

If it took ten months from Enron’s collapse to Sarbanes-Oxley, he noted, this time it took about seven weeks — a shift he called the “AI SOX moment” that will mint a new profession: the AI assurance professional.

How AURÄI works

AURÄI says it combines AI agents that automate governance, risk and compliance activities with trained professionals who oversee their work.

The platform supports AI system discovery, evidence collection, control testing, policy drafting and audit documentation. Its agents operate within defined boundaries and record their actions, while certified professionals review outputs, challenge findings and sign off on critical decisions.

“AI agents should escalate to human judgement instead of guessing,” Olayinka said.

Alongside the platform, AURÄI trains and certifies professionals to operate its agents and oversee their execution, reflecting what Olayinka described as a changing workforce requirement.

“AI will not take your job. Someone who mastered it will.”

The model, he said, was born from a recurring problem he observed across more than 20 years in enterprise audit and cybersecurity roles at Deloitte, PwC, Citigroup, GE Digital and Zimmer Biomet, where he previously served as Chief Information Security Officer and Global Head of IT Audit: organisations had sound frameworks but struggled to implement them efficiently.

“The same pattern repeated everywhere: the frameworks were sound, the execution was broken.”

Why it matters

For enterprises, weak AI oversight creates operational, financial and reputational risks, particularly in industries where automated decisions affect customers and employees.

With regulations such as the EU AI Act introducing requirements around risk management, transparency and human oversight, organisations need practical ways to demonstrate that their AI systems are appropriately governed.

AURÄI aims to help them produce that evidence for internal assurance teams, external auditors, regulators and boards.

The company is led by three co-founders with experience spanning audit, infrastructure and institutional investment.

About the co-founders

Olayinka James is the founder and chief executive officer of AURÄI.

He brings more than 20 years of experience spanning enterprise audit, cybersecurity, information security leadership and governance across organisations including Deloitte, PwC, Citigroup, GE Digital and Zimmer Biomet. He previously served as Chief Information Security Officer and Global Head of IT Audit at Zimmer Biomet, where his work included improving audit preparation and reducing audit exceptions.

Mohammed Mijindadi is a co-founder and the chief commercial officer of AURÄI.

He is the founder of Africa Infrastructure Solutions Ltd (AISL), former President of GE Nigeria and former Managing Director of GE Vernova Gas Power West Africa.

He has negotiated more than $1 billion in infrastructure agreements with five African governments, and leads commercial expansion and enterprise partnerships at AURÄI.

This followed earlier leadership positions in GE Transportation and GE Gas Power Systems. His career began in engineering and construction, including work with Julius Berger Nigeria and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, before moving into commercial, strategic and executive leadership.

Chris Kanwei is a co-founder and the chief financial officer of AURÄI.

He is the founder of RealCorp Capital and a former institutional investor at Aviva and Morgan Stanley covering EMEA. He brings deep expertise in institutional capital, risk and cross-border investment, and leads finance and capital strategy at AURÄI. Chris is an ecosystem builder and community leader who writes about African ventures, investment and diaspora capital.

Through AURÄI, the trio are pursuing a broader vision, and that is combining AI-powered enterprise governance with the training and certification of professionals capable of overseeing its execution.

AURÄI is now expanding its engagement with enterprise customers and design partners by inviting banks, fintechs, consulting firms and other organisations that build or use AI to explore its platform through a demo and waitlist at https://www.auraisystems.ai/.