CRX 2026: The AI-powered future requires transforming risk into opportunity

What does the future of internal audit, risk, compliance, and infosec look like? What does AI mean for our professions, our businesses, and the world at large? These questions have become omnipresent in my conversations with governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) professionals, whether they pervade the discussion or linger just below its surface.

The answers are a work in progress. But there is a singular truth at the center of every answer: Humans will both shape and adapt to the AI-enabled future. We will define it and be defined by it.

Indeed, human history is a remarkable story of our ability to adapt to change and harness those adaptations to our advantage. As tools and technologies emerge and advance, we develop new skills and capabilities. New professions come into existence; long-standing professions have a choice: They adapt and find a new way forward — or they disappear.

GRC professionals stand at this crossroads. The AI age is both an existential challenge testing our adaptability and a vital opportunity to redefine our future. The future belongs to those who see AI’s risks as an open invitation for transformation.

That is the driving vision behind Optro’s CRX 2026 conference, taking place October 13–15, 2026. Every aspect of the agenda coalesces around a central theme of transforming risk into opportunity.

CRX is an essential opportunity to better understand how AI will change our work and our world — and how we can harness those changes to reimagine our roles, reinvigorate our professions, and supercharge the value we provide.

What is CRX? A new name to reflect an expanding vision and mission

CRX is the Connected Risk Experience, Optro's conference for audit, risk, compliance, and infosec professionals.

Both names changed for the same reason:

• Optro (formerly AuditBoard) rebranded to reflect the company's expansion across audit, risk, compliance, and infosec into a complete GRC intelligence platform.
• CRX (formerly Audit & Beyond) reflects that same expansion at the conference level, built for all GRC disciplines.

New names, expansive mission

Founded in 2014 by former auditors, Optro has always been driven by a vision of transformation. What started as an ambitious dream to empower auditors with solutions to manage spreadsheets, fieldwork, and controls has transformed into a complete GRC intelligence platform.

Now, enabled by key acquisitions and partnerships, Optro has built the closed-loop architecture and domain-tuned AI engine that brings our founding vision to fruition. Now, CRX brings together the audit, risk, compliance, and infosec teams, all facing the same seismic shift.

GRC itself is due for a rebrand. Our core missions will remain, but we must strategically expand our roles to ensure lasting relevance and value. CRX is where we can come together to understand what’s changing, share and stress-test strategies, and leave with a stronger plan for the future.

An agenda focused on enhancing the human-AI partnership

The 2026 CRX agenda is directly responsive to how GRC is changing, with sessions and speakers focused on making sense of AI’s impact and empowering teams with the skills, tools, leading practices, and connections they need to respond. We’ll look at:

• The agentic AI shift, examining its reach and scale to provide you with a clear picture of how agents work — and how you can put them to work.
• New models for emerging risks, with leaders across industries offering insights on using AI to level up ERM with more proactive risk management.
• Operational resiliency, sharing a forward-looking framework for transforming resilience from a reactive discipline to a strategic capability.
• Cyber risk, exploring best practices for quantifying cyber risks and framing risk in language that drives decision-making.
• Decision under accountability, assessing how to maintain accountability in agentic AI systems to support trust and decision-making.
• Regulatory compliance automation, investigating AI capabilities in real-time horizon scanning, gap analysis, and automated control generation.
• How-to guidance on using AI in audit, building unified risk taxonomies, framing risk appetites in the context of strategy and growth, data-based risk modeling, and more.

Need help making the business case for CRX? Download this customizable letter to share with your manager.

The human edge in an agentic AI world

As GRC teams adapt to and shape our AI-enabled future, understanding how agentic AI works is part of the equation. Understanding how those agentic capabilities impact our future is the other key component.

That’s why my main-stage keynote will take the form of a conversation with Kieran Taylor, who built Midship — now the audit agent at the heart of Optro’s GRC intelligence platform. I view this conversation as an important opportunity to help internal auditors build a bridge from understanding agentic AI-powered GRC to a clearer vision of our future. As AI automates the activities that have traditionally pulled our focus away from fulfilling our role as trusted and strategic advisors, our day-to-day will shift from manual execution to value-add work that exercises the critical, ethical, contextual, and creative thinking skills that give us our human edge.

As the forthcoming third edition of Trusted Advisors will argue, I am confident that AI actually increases the value of being human. For every hour saved by AI’s fast-growing capabilities around evidence collection, control testing, documentation, and reporting, internal auditors can devote another hour to the human strengths AI cannot easily replicate: judgment, curiosity, communication, relationship-building, and courage.

Follow the risk. Join us at CRX 2026

I’ve said it for decades: We must follow the risk. Risk brings both threats and opportunities, so “following the risk” demands understanding and responding to both. Conversely, ignoring risk will cause us to drift into irrelevance.

Instead of taking a “wait and see” approach, letting others define our place in an AI-enabled world, we must embrace its risks to drive our transformation.

While 2026 marks my sixth year participating in the CRX conference, I truly feel its purpose and content are more essential than ever.

Join me in making CRX 2026 a milestone event, helping GRC practitioners come together to architect a stronger future for our profession. Whether you’ll attend in person or virtually, register for CRX today.