Key Insights From The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, and Compliance Platforms, Q2 2026

Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms: Core Use Cases Governance, risk, and compliance platforms have five core use cases: audit management, compliance management, enterprise risk management, risk mitigation and remediation, and technology risk management. This graphic has an associated spreadsheet that includes the objectives and top differentiators of each. Please access the spreadsheet for details.

Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q2 2026 This graphic plots vendors by their overall ranking, determined by current offering and strategy scores. This graphic has an associated spreadsheet that includes all data presented. Please access the spreadsheet for details. Figure 1 Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms Scorecard, Q2 2026 This table shows vendors’ criteria scores by current offering and strategy.

Security vendors are increasingly building AI capabilities into their tools and services, including those that focus on the security aspect of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). These capabilities differ significantly from vendor to vendor, especially based on the use case and the team using them.

Key Insights From Reference Customers Of The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q4 2023

Governance, Risk, And Data Concerns Are Among The Top Challenges To Sales AI Adoption This bar chart shows the greatest challenges to adoption of AI or ML in sales organizations. The top challenges among sales professionals are governance and risk (32%), data privacy and security concerns (32%), and employee experience and readiness (29%). Other frequently cited challenges include lack of understanding where to apply AI (27%), data infrastructure (27%), and lack of clear AI strategy (26%).

This will be your organization’s set of rules — policies, processes, and practices — for how AI can and should be used and to enable accountability for its use to ensure that it’s responsible, ethical, and adheres to existing laws and compliance requirements. Globally, there are a multitude of frameworks for AI governance and risks.

Fund risk remediation. In 2025, 26% of enterprise security decision-makers said their firm is prioritizing improving their ability to proactively remediate risks. In 2024, 21% of enterprise security decision-makers said improving their ability to proactively remediate risks was a top strategic information/IT security priority. Security leaders must ensure that remediation capabilities scale with detection velocity. This includes investing in security posture, proactive security, and automation.

North America leads with regtech and intelligence feeds at 15%, followed by governance, risk, and compliance and continuous control monitoring at 14%, and contract lifecycle management and board management at 13%.

Clearly demonstrate a holistic approach to governance, risk, and compliance. Vendors and customers alike often conflate risk with compliance or eschew governance altogether. A CISO buys a GRC platform for IT risk management but learns it can’t support cyber risk analysis, only security control assessment.