Post by Protiviti Middle East Member Firm

Could there be a fourth line in the future of assurance? It is the kind of question that reframes everything and it was at the heart of the closing keynote at the IIA 2026 International Conference in Singapore, where Brad Monterio, Executive Vice President, Learning, Licensing, and Sales at The IIA, engaged Sophia, the humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics, in a live, unscripted conversation on AI, governance, and the evolving nature of trust. The dialogue covered ground that internal audit leaders cannot afford to ignore. How do organisations maintain meaningful oversight of AI-driven decisions? What does model explainability demand of the audit function? Where do the ethical boundaries of machine intelligence sit and who is responsible for drawing them? Sophia's position on organisational trust in AI was unambiguous: trust must be earned through transparency, validation, and accountability. Human judgment is not a checkpoint at the end of a process, it is the standard that governs the entire one. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in decision-making, risk management, and governance structures, the Three Lines Model faces questions it was not originally designed to answer. The profession that grapples seriously with those questions and builds the frameworks to address them will be the one that leads. Protiviti is committed to being part of that work. #IIA2026 #Sophia #InternalAudit #AI #Singapore #Protiviti