Getting your Compliance Programme “Unstuck” with AI
In an assessment of where most in-house compliance teams are currently focussed, the reality is that very few in-house teams have progressed beyond building and formulating their legal registers. Even for those who do have these in place, they are struggling to maintain their registers, due to the extensive manual maintenance required to migrate regulatory content from a platform onto a spreadsheet. Yes, most legal registers exist on spreadsheets! Very few of the in-house compliance teams have meaningfully moved beyond this point into the actual nitty-gritty of data-driven and evidence-based compliance required for the effective management of regulatory risk and addressing identified non-compliances in their business and operational environments.
This is where the potential of AI exists in compliance. I anticipate that the dream of every in-house compliance team lies in legal registers that automatically update with changes and developments in law, laws that are automatically risk assessed and ranked for prioritisation and whole pieces of legislation and regulations that can be structured and curated into nifty checklists of only the material obligations that tell you exactly what you need to do to be compliant. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the potential of AI to fast-track lagging compliance programmes in the most cost-effective way, without time-consuming manual processing (as is the common practice), the necessity for investments in large, cumbersome and expensive systems (which often turn out to be “white elephants” by the time the system is fully customised and implemented), or ever-expanding legal and compliance teams (which are simply no longer the norm), and with the possibility of reducing what was traditionally a 10 or 20-step process, into a 5-step process.
