News Release
Alpha Institute Launches the Agentic Audit Council: An Exclusive Network for Senior Leaders Driving Audit in the AI Era
The Alpha Institute for AI Governance launches an invitation-only peer forum for audit committee chairs, financial executives, board directors, and governance leaders responsible for oversight in the age of AI.
The Alpha Institute for AI Governance, the independent research, standards, and education arm of Alpha Governance Group, PBC, today announced the launch of the Agentic Audit Council, an invitation-only peer forum for audit committee chairs, financial executives, board directors, and governance leaders responsible for oversight in the age of AI. The Council is co-chaired by Shannon Nash and Janet S. Wong, two accomplished board directors and audit leaders with deep expertise spanning financial reporting, internal controls, risk management, technology oversight, and governance, with Colleen Honigsberg serving as a Founding Council Member and Distinguished Research Fellow of the Alpha Institute for AI Governance.
As enterprises accelerate adoption of agentic AI systems, the Agentic Audit Council will provide a confidential, practitioner-led forum to help leaders define what rigorous, board-ready oversight looks like when decision-making, workflows, and control environments are increasingly shaped by autonomous systems.
Every major company is confronting a new oversight challenge: AI is no longer confined to isolated use cases. It is beginning to act across workflows, decisions, and operating processes that carry material implications for financial reporting, compliance, cybersecurity, internal controls, enterprise risk, and fiduciary accountability. The question is no longer whether organizations will adopt agentic AI, but whether boards, audit committees, and senior executives are prepared to govern it with the discipline, transparency, and control standards stakeholders expect.
The Agentic Audit Council is designed to close that gap. Operating under the Chatham House Rule, it will convene a trusted room for leaders to debate emerging risks, pressure-test oversight models, and develop practical governance approaches that boards can defend, regulators can understand, and enterprises can operationalize. The Council is grounded in a core principle of the Alpha Institute's work: governance is not a brake on innovation; it is the infrastructure that makes durable adoption possible.
The Council's work will extend beyond private convenings. Research, benchmarks, and board-ready frameworks developed through the Agentic Audit Council will be published by the Alpha Institute for AI Governance to support directors, investors, AI companies, policymakers, and senior operators navigating the control and accountability implications of agentic systems.
As part of the Alpha Institute's broader council model, the Agentic Audit Council will help define how continuous AI governance applies to one of the most important functions in the enterprise: audit and oversight. Its mandate is not simply to improve discussion, but to produce applied guidance for organizations that need stronger assurance, sharper accountability, and clearer standards of care as AI becomes embedded in consequential systems and decisions.
Agentic Audit Council Leadership
Shannon Nash, Co-Chair
Shannon Nash is a global C-suite leader, board director, SEC financial expert, attorney, and CPA with more than 30 years of experience across finance, technology, audit, risk, and board oversight. She serves on the board and Audit Committee of Netscout Systems (NASDAQ: NTCT), chairs the Compensation Committee of SoFi Bank, a subsidiary of SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ: SOFI), and chairs the Audit Committee of Lazy Dog Restaurants. A 2025 NACD Directorship 100 honoree, she was recently appointed to the Advisory Council of the Nasdaq Center for Board Excellence. She currently serves as Chief Operating and Financial Officer of Vibrant Planet, an AI-powered data and intelligence platform for wildfire and natural disaster forecasting, community risk, and resilience planning, serving enterprises, utilities, insurers, and public agencies. She previously served as Chief Financial Officer of Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery subsidiary, and as CFO of Reputation.com and Inside Source, with earlier senior finance leadership roles at Amgen and Cumulus Media. She began her career at KPMG and Cooley LLP.
Janet S. Wong, Co-Chair
Janet S. Wong is an experienced board director, SEC financial expert, CPA and retired KPMG partner with more than 30 years of public accounting experience. Currently, she serves on the public company boards of Valvoline, Inc. and TWFG, Inc., where she is Audit Committee Chair and brings expertise in financial accounting, internal controls, risk management, cybersecurity and AI oversight, and strategic planning.
She holds a certificate in Cyber Risk Oversight from Carnegie Mellon University and completed the U.S. Secret Service Cyber Board Academy in April 2026. She is a frequent speaker on topics important to the Audit Committee and the Boardroom.
Her honors include recognition by Board Prospects as one of the Top 30 Asian Americans serving on U.S. public company boards and named in 2022 as a NACD Directorship 100.
She is a Founding Member of both the Wall Street Journal Board of Directors Council and the Alpha Council, an organization focused on AI governance in the Boardroom.
Agentic Audit Council's Distinguished Research Fellow
Colleen Honigsberg, Distinguished Research Fellow, Alpha Institute for AI Governance; Founding Member, Agentic Audit Council
Colleen Honigsberg is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where she serves as Faculty Co-Director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance and as a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research. She also leads Stanford Law's Governance & Assurance in AI Networks (GAAIN) Initiative. Her research focuses on the empirical study of corporate and securities law. A former Certified Public Accountant, she currently serves on the PCAOB's Standards and Emerging Issues Advisory Group (SEIAG). She previously served on the Executive Committee of the SEC's Investor Advisory Committee and as a Senior Economic Research Fellow with the PCAOB. Before entering academia, she worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services. She has testified before Congress, the SEC, and the PCAOB on accounting and securities law issues, and her scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals as well as popular media. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of Management Science. As Distinguished Research Fellow of the Alpha Institute for AI Governance and Founding Member of the Agentic Audit Council, she anchors the Council's work in academic rigor, empirical research, and durable frameworks for board and audit committee decision-making.
Read more: Colleen Honigsberg at Stanford Law School
Quotes
Quote from Steven Wolfe Pereira, Founder and CEO, Alpha Governance Group
"Agentic AI is reshaping how decisions get made, how work gets executed, and how risk moves through the enterprise. The audit function now sits at the center of one of the most important governance transitions of this decade. We launched the Agentic Audit Council to give board directors and audit leaders the forum they need to define credible oversight before the market, regulators, and stakeholders demand it of them."
Quote from Shannon Nash, Co-Chair, Agentic Audit Council
"Boards have spent the past few years asking where AI is being used. The next wave is less about adding tools and more about redesigning the work itself. Picture a single agent doing the work of sourcing, procurement, legal, security, and finance and routing only the exceptions to a person, shifting people from doing the work to directing it. That demands a different governance focus: which workflows are being reimagined around agent capabilities, and what does that mean for controls, accountability, and fiduciary oversight? The Council is about helping boards move beyond governing AI as a technology to governing it as a new operating model."
Quote from Janet S. Wong, Co-Chair, Agentic Audit Council
"The rise of agentic AI raises fundamental questions for audit committees and boards to properly include AI governance: how to evaluate internal controls, how to think about management's assumptions, how to oversee risk at machine speed where quarterly reporting may not align, and how to ensure transparency in increasingly complex environments. This Council creates a trusted setting for experienced leaders to develop the standards and practices this new era requires."
Quote from Colleen Honigsberg, Distinguished Research Fellow, Alpha Institute for AI Governance; Founding Member, Agentic Audit Council
"Many companies have articulated AI governance principles. The next challenge is learning how to operationalize those principles in ways that are credible, auditable, and effective. Agentic AI raises entirely new questions about internal controls, auditor oversight, and accountability, and we need rigorous empirical research to answer them. The Agentic Audit Council is where we connect rigorous research to the practical judgments boards and audit leaders have to make right now."
About the Alpha Institute for AI Governance
The Alpha Institute for AI Governance is the independent research, standards, and education arm of Alpha Governance Group, PBC. It defines what good AI governance looks like in practice through board-ready research, policy-relevant frameworks, executive education, and leadership councils designed to help organizations oversee AI with clarity, confidence, and rigor.
Membership
The Agentic Audit Council is invitation-only. Membership is open to audit committee chairs, public company directors, chief audit executives, chief financial officers, chief accounting officers, chief risk officers, general counsel, and other senior leaders responsible for internal controls, disclosure, compliance, and enterprise oversight in the age of AI.