Arctera, a business unit of Cloud Software Group, has published the State of AI Governance 2026 report, based on a survey of 500 decision-makers across the Americas and EMEA in finance, healthcare, and energy. The findings point to a widening gap between policy adoption and operational readiness in how regulated organisations govern AI-assisted work.
The headline finding: 78% of organisations using AI expect communications risk to increase over the next 12 to 24 months. Yet only 19% have the controls needed to prove how AI-assisted communications and decisions were actually handled. More than half (55%) have introduced AI policies, training, and review steps, but that top-level preparedness has not translated into the evidence layer that enforcement requires.
"Moving from policy to proof means organisations must treat evidence as part of the AI workflow itself, not something to be recreated after the fact. This is the foundation of defensible AI governance."
— Soniya Bopache, SVP & GM, Arctera
The research highlights specific gaps. Nearly a third (31%) prioritise AI oversight logging, and the same proportion prioritise faster cross-channel search and reconstruction — activities that become relevant when demonstrating what an AI tool produced, who reviewed it, and whether a record was retained. Almost two-thirds (60%) of respondents say compliance is primarily accountable for AI governance, creating pressure on compliance and legal teams who need systems infrastructure, not just policy documents, to deliver on that accountability.
A secondary finding: 70% of organisations view archives as a major or critical asset for AI-driven innovation, suggesting a shift in how enterprise data infrastructure is being positioned — from retrospective compliance record to forward-looking AI resource.
The survey was administered online in May 2026 by Hanover Research across 500 full-time professionals. Arctera was created in 2024 from Veritas Technologies.
To stay across the latest in cloud, AI and enterprise tech analysis from Compare the Cloud, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://www.comparethecloud.net/newsletter
