When Diligent Corporation CEO Brian Stafford visited Vancouver this fall, he emphasized the city’s growing importance within the company’s global network. Since acquiring Vancouver-born Galvanize in 2021 for a reported US $1 billion, Diligent has maintained a significant presence here—one that continues to play a key role in the company’s AI-driven evolution of governance and risk management.

Diligent—already a leader in governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software—quietly made Vancouver one of its key North American hubs alongside New York and Washington, D.C.

Stafford said the company “wanted to make more of an investment on the product side and be able to scale the platform across all the aspects of what we did.” The Galvanize team, he added, “had built a really good foundation in risk and audit, and we thought it would be additive to the platform.”

The Vancouver office continues to house engineering, product, sales, and professional-services teams. While fewer staff work in the building today due to remote-work trends, Stafford described a “very, very large and thriving” Canadian team. The company plans to move to a new location near the harbour next year.

Canada, Stafford noted, remains an important market and talent base for Diligent. “Our hubs in North America are New York, D.C., and Vancouver,” he said. “We have a really great customer base here. We serve most of the large banks, and we do a lot of work with really fantastic Canadian companies.”

He pointed to a key difference in how clients here approach GRC. “Outside the U.S.—in Canada, in the U.K.—companies view compliance and risk management in a more strategic way,” he said. “In the U.S., it’s often a check-the-box exercise. But here, clients are more proactive and more thoughtful about how risk ties to long-term strategy.”

That mindset shapes how Diligent tailors its products. “There’s a lot of really cool AI innovation going on here,” Stafford said. “Some of our product leadership and thinking is done right here.”

More than half of Diligent’s 100-plus product teams are now developing AI capabilities. “There’s not a more exciting time to build product than right now,” Stafford said. “AI is a huge TAM expander for GRC. It takes workflow software and makes it active—it does things for you.”

He said the technology is helping clients handle growing regulatory demands without expanding headcount. “Regulation keeps going up, despite whatever you might hear or read,” he said. “So how do you deal with that? The only way is if technology helps. AI will expedite, improve, and make people’s jobs easier.”

Adoption has been strong. “A large bank in the U.K. told us this will save them tens of thousands of hours,” Stafford said. “That kind of impact is material.”

He attributes the rapid uptake to Diligent’s approach: “We tell [clients], ‘Just turn it on. Try it. If it works for you, great.’ There’s a lot of AI out there that’s hand-wavy, but we’ve built it right into the application so it drives real business value.”

The result, he said, has “turbo-charged our growth” over the past year.

With more than 2,000 employees worldwide—about 900 focused on product and R&D—Diligent’s teams operate across continents. Still, Stafford believes in the value of in-person collaboration. “People do really good creative work when they get to be in a room with colleagues,” he said. “You build things when you get people together.”

Most Vancouver hires come through personal networks, something he’d like to expand. “We’ve historically kept a low profile,” Stafford said. “We’re pretty darn well known with our clients, which is where we want to be known—but we could make a bigger splash more broadly.”

Stafford sees artificial intelligence not only enhancing GRC but reshaping it. “There’s a massive opportunity for AI to transform governance, risk, and compliance,” he said. “It’s going to unlock potential for people who can now have agents and AI helping to run compliance or audit with the right oversight. It’ll make organizations fundamentally safer and better.”

That vision connects back to Vancouver, where the former Galvanize office continues to anchor product innovation for a company that now serves more than 23,000 clients worldwide.

“It’s a great office, a great team,” Stafford said. “There’s a lot of really good product being built here.”