Epilogue

Data shows that E&C is at the AI table and building literacy, but third-party governance lags, creating material exposures exactly where risk is concentrated.

WHAT THIS MEANS

Decision rights exist but artifacts lag. You can steer AI decisions, but without standard artifacts (model inventory, risk reviews, vendor clauses) influence won’t scale.

eLearning ≠ control. Employee training is good, but control points are what regulators and boards will look for.

The blind spot is with third parties. Most AI capabilities that organizations leverage will arrive via vendors, only 15% coverage in Codes of Conduct is a material exposure.

Ownership creates urgency. With 84% of E&C owning third-party risk management, there’s no handoff excuse. The mandate is to standardize AI-specific controls and expand coverage in a way that scales.

Epilogue

As we bring this inaugural Artificial Intelligence Report to a close, we extend our thanks to the many ethics and compliance practitioners who shared their time, insights, and candor to help shape its contents.

Not everyone could participate. Several organizations told us that while they are actively exploring and implementing AI, the work is too sensitive and proprietary to be shared publicly. We respect and appreciate those boundaries. Even among the organizations that did go on the record, there was acknowledgment that this is an unusual moment: AI’s rapid evolution has blurred the line between what is strategic for the enterprise and what is proprietary to compliance.

Compliance has long been a discipline where collaboration outweighs competition. Yet today, the transformative power of AI means that how an organization deploys it—whether for monitoring, investigations triage, or third-party risk—can itself confer competitive advantage. This will not always be the case. For now, we are in a rare window where AI adoption is experimental, entrepreneurial, and highly individualized. Every organization’s use case looks different, and every success story is still being written.

We fully expect that when we return to this topic in six, 12, or 18 months, the landscape will look radically different. More case studies will exist, more best practices will be shareable, and the sophistication of AI integration in ethics and compliance will be far more advanced. What feels premature today will soon become standard.

One theme, however, has already emerged clearly:

Culture is central to AI adoption.

Across industries, leaders described how the strength of their culture—whether through a top-down mandate to experiment, or through an environment of psychological safety that encourages employees to test new tools—determines how well AI takes root. The same trust, accountability, and openness that sustain compliance programs also shape the success of AI initiatives.

Ethics and compliance has always been the steward of culture. Now, at this inflection point, culture is becoming the bridge that allows organizations to harness AI responsibly and effectively. The programs that are most successful today are those that leverage culture to unlock AI’s potential—advancing business integrity while positioning their organizations for the future.

This intersection of culture and technology is one of the most fascinating developments to emerge from this report. Going forward, it may well define the table stakes for what a truly effective ethics and compliance AI program looks like.

Thank you for reading. It has been a privilege to compile this report, and we look forward to revisiting this conversation soon.

Bill Coffin

Editor in Chief, Ethisphere

The Data and Organizations Behind This Report

Real-World Ethics & Compliance Data: For years, Ethisphere has built data sets that prove strong ethics is good business. Our program benchmarking data shows what excellence looks like for organizations seeking to develop best-in-class business integrity. And our Ethics Premium proves how much highly ethical organizations outperform their peers.

This report features insights from Ethisphere's proprietary data set, the 2025 World’s Most Ethical Companies^® part of the data intelligence BELA clients access to benchmark and strengthen their programs.

Ethisphere is the trusted community for enabling global leaders to measure, mature, and unlock and demonstrate the power and value of their integrity programs. With 400+ global organizations, thousands of resources, and millions of ethical culture and E&C program data points, Ethisphere is re-defining how programs accelerate maturity.

SpeakUp is a leading provider of ethics and compliance technology, designed to simplify the way organizations manage risk and foster transparent workplace cultures. The platform enables employees to easily understand, report, and disclose ethics and compliance matters, while offering compliance officers a centralized system to manage daily workflows and act on critical issues efficiently.

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT) is a national, full-service firm representing businesses in the U.S. and globally. Known for a client-centric, industry-focused model, the firm blends multidisciplinary teams, technology, and deep sector insight to navigate complex litigation, transformative deals, and evolving regulation. BTI ranks DWT among firms best suited for high-value, novel work.