This briefing explores how the Audit Committee Chair role is shifting beyond financial oversight into risk, culture, technology and controls — and what that means for the decisions chairs need to make right now.
Grant Thornton draws on six years of Corporate Governance Review data to show how the Audit Committee remit has expanded well beyond financial reporting, and what that means for the Chair's role in practice.
The picture that emerges is one of committees absorbing a growing share of oversight responsibility, often without a corresponding redesign of governance frameworks. With only 7% of FTSE 350 boards holding dedicated AI, data or cyber expertise, and just 36% of companies setting out mitigations for the emerging risks they identify, the gap between what Audit Committees are being asked to govern and what they are equipped to govern is widening.
The report explores:
- Committee composition — why strong financial expertise and high independence levels are increasingly offset by a critical skills gap in AI and cyber, and what that means for the quality of challenge committees can provide.
- Culture assurance — how internal audit's mandate on culture is growing, with 90% of Audit Committee Chairs now providing satisfactory personal commentary disclosures, up from 72% in 2020, and why translating culture into measurable governance insight remains the harder task.
- Emerging risks — why the fact that 96% of companies assess emerging risks but only 36% set out mitigations represents a gap that Audit Committee Chairs should be actively probing, alongside the disconnect between front-end optimism in CEO statements and back-end risk disclosure.
- Provision 29 — what the shift to a formal board-level effectiveness declaration requires in practice, and why the companies deriving most value are those treating it as a governance discipline rather than a compliance milestone.
- Audit quality — why disclosure quality at an all-time high is not the most pressing question, and what Audit Committees should be asking their external auditors about the use of AI and whether quality is embedded in culture or merely applied as a risk layer.
Learn More:
Read the full report here to learn more about the priorities that Audit Committees should be focussing on.