Charting New Frontiers in Compliance with Generative Artificial Intelligence
The legal domain, with its regulations and policies, is in a state of perpetual flux. New laws and amendments surface with frequency and complexity that render traditional monitoring methods obsolete.
A single regulatory change can reverberate through multiple regulatory topics. In the US alone, Regology captured 707,834 events in 2023, spanning all bills, regulatory changes, and updates from the agencies it tracks. Within the banking industry, for instance, there were more than 8,000 such events. To process this deluge of regulatory information, compliance teams would traditionally undertake a series of manual tasks, such as:
- Sifting through authoritative documents
- Cross-referencing numerous physical repositories and databases
- Consulting legal experts for interpretations of nuanced clauses
- Updating multiple spreadsheets
- Making policy adjustments
While effective with a small number of changes, these processes cannot tackle today’s volume of amendments. They provide a view of the regulatory developments akin to looking in a rearview mirror—trailing behind. And relying on outdated data in making critical compliance decisions is fraught with risks.
Since the big splash that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) made in 2023, it quickly became part of a variety of business applications, including regulatory compliance. Already in 2024, the possibilities for optimization and time-saving are far-reaching. It becomes not just about adapting to change fast enough but about being at the forefront of it, shaping compliance strategies with more forward momentum.
The Difference Between AI and GenAI for Compliance
Seeing terms like “AI-powered” or “AI-driven” is not new—far from it. So, what is the key difference when it comes to AI-powered versus GenAI solutions for compliance? As the name suggests, generative AI ‘generates’ information upon request, whereas AI (in the form of natural language processing, machine learning, etc.) automates its collection from various sources and analyzes it.
Here is what this means for compliance professionals: Having an AI-powered platform, for example, Regology, will track and monitor all of the regulatory events in one database. This includes bills, regulatory changes, and agency updates with jurisdictional and topic-specific filters. While GenAI built on top of that platform, like Regology’s Reggi, allows in-depth querying of the regulatory content aggregated in this legal database, becoming an interactive research assistant embedded within compliance workflows.
This way, compliance teams can organize their smart law library and automatically track regulatory changes, as well as extract information, like requirements and controls, out of that constantly-updated legal database in seconds. They can go beyond merely keeping up with legal changes to anticipating them, guiding compliance strategies with foresight rather than hindsight.
Real-time Regulatory Discovery
From complex supply chains to rapid market changes to social responsibilities, companies operate in unique ecosystems with distinct challenges and nuances, and real-time insights can provide a strategic advantage. Imagine being able to adapt to a new regulation ahead of time, or adjusting your compliance strategy proactively in anticipation of shifts in the legal environment.
GenAI assistant helps provide that competitive edge by scanning, analyzing, and interpreting vast amounts of legal and regulatory data in mere seconds. It works as a question-answer chat tool, making research a fluid and efficient experience. Regology’s Reggi also includes citations with corresponding regulatory references, providing fine-tuned search results.
Regulatory compliance teams no longer need to go through authoritative documents line by line to identify applicable requirements to then create policies or controls. They can save time by having GenAI help identify legal obligations, draft policies, risks, and controls, and then have workflows to review and finalize them. Best of all, these capabilities are available to them today. Capabilities such as:
Querying Laws and Regulations
GenAI-driven search engines are very versatile. They can both identify relevant legal content and requirements that apply to a specific topic or industry and answer specific questions about it. They do so by parsing vast legal databases in seconds, lifting the most relevant information, and synthesizing it into appropriate responses.
Summarizing Regulatory Information
One of the strengths of generative AI is summarizing and simplifying complex concepts in the legal field. By taking into account the user’s background and the wider regulatory context, GenAI is able to distill the core concepts and explain them in a natural language.
Comparing Laws Across Jurisdictions
For businesses operating globally, GenAI can juxtapose legal provisions across regions, highlighting similarities and differences. It can compare laws on any topic across jurisdictions by analyzing information from different sources to provide users with a comprehensive view of the legal landscape.
The Vanguard of Compliance (But Not a Cure-All Solution)
The roles of compliance professionals are undergoing a transformation. Instead of spending countless hours manually sifting through regulatory documents or cross-referencing compliance measures, they can now delegate these tasks to AI systems that can do it in mere seconds. Instead, they can focus on actual strategies that align with the corporate vision and innovation, and show that the organization is in control.
Generative AI is a powerful new tool in the compliance toolkit, bearing in mind that it is not a panacea that can fully replace human professionals. A lot of attention still needs to be paid to the finer details of regulatory interpretation, contextual understanding, bias and ambiguity, as well as working with regulatory bodies on clarification.
In the foreseeable future, GenAI is expected to serve as support for human skills rather than supplanting them, and compliance roles are evolving to become more strategic, insightful, and impactful with GenAI by their side. Hence the widely-used phrase "AI won't replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI." In this new paradigm, compliance professionals leverage AI's computational power and use their expertise, judgment, and ethical considerations, ensuring a more balanced and efficient approach to compliance management.
To learn more about Generative AI and its real-world use cases in compliance management, read our free eBook. Download it here.
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