AI for Compliance Policy Management: What, How & Why You Need to Embrace it Now?

With many organizations struggling to cope with regulatory change, effective compliance policy management can make all the difference.

Though Compliance as an organizational function is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies, the rise of AI technologies – and digital assistants – presents an opportunity that should be treated with optimism rather than caution.

When it comes to Compliance, there are some obvious reasons where AI should be avoided, but there is one area that it presents a particular benefit: policy management.

Harnessing AI to augment Compliance policy management, training & engagement

In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges that organizations face with manual compliance management processes and how AI can help to address these challenges by automating and streamlining compliance processes.

First, let’s take a quick look at why effective policy management is so critical for organizations in today’s world…

GRC and ESG progams live or die on the effectiveness of policy management

Recent years have seen an increased focus on organizations’ ethics and culture with numerous new legislation coming into force at national, international and industry-specific levels.

In response to this, we’ve seen a huge shift in focus in how organizations take responsibility for their ethics, culture and general operating standards to ensure they remain not just compliant, but resilient in the face of economic uncertainty.

Both GRC (Governance, Risk Management and Compliance) and, more recently ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) have become high priories for organization as they strive to adopt more robust, sustainable practices and drive positive social and environmental outcomes. And both heavily rely on effective policy management in order to be a success.

Yet despite this growing focus, many organizations still face numerous challenges in implementing and managing their GRC and ESG strategies such as inconsistent data collection and reporting, lack of transparency, and difficulties in tracking and monitoring progress.

How AI can revolutionize the way organizations manage compliance

Managing compliance is a critical task for organizations across industries, but the traditional manual processes used to do so can be time-consuming, costly, and prone to error.

Fortunately, new technologies like AI (and other digital assistant technologies) can help organizations to manage compliance more effectively, efficiently, and accurately.

Challenges of manual compliance management

Manual compliance management processes are prone to several challenges that can lead to errors, inefficiencies, and increased risk, for example:

Lack of Centralization: Compliance policies and procedures can be scattered across different departments, systems, and formats. This makes it difficult for organizations to ensure that policies are up-to-date, accessible, and enforced.
Inefficient Processes: Manual compliance management processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, as they often involve manual tasks such as reviewing policies, tracking updates, and communicating changes. This can lead to delays, errors, and inefficiencies.
Ineffective Communication: Effective communication is essential for successful compliance management, as policies need to be communicated clearly, consistently, and to the right stakeholders. However, manual communication processes can be inconsistent, incomplete, and prone to errors.
Lack of Real-Time Monitoring: Manual compliance management processes can make it difficult for organizations to monitor compliance in real-time, which can lead to gaps, inconsistencies, and increased risk.

Benefits of using AI technologies for compliance programs

By harnessing the power of AI, digital assistants that use NLP (natural language processing) and GPT-style language models can help organizations address these challenges by automating and streamlining some of the more complex compliance management processes.

Centralized policy storage makes policy and procedure documents accessible to all relevant stakeholders, regardless of their location or device, making it easy for organizations to ensure that policies are up-to-date, consistent, and easily accessed by everyone who needs them

Automatically updating stakeholders on any changes to policies/procedures, certificates, and training, etc, and providing conversational-style knowledge/answers to questions reduces the need for manual interventions and emails and makes communication more efficient

Likewise, real-time monitoring and analytics enables organizations to identify and address compliance issues before they become problems.

Managing Compliance Policies & Training

One crucial – yet often overlooked – aspect of an effective GRC or ESG strategy is policy management and training.

Policies and training help organizations to establish clear guidelines and expectations for their employees, ensuring that they understand their roles and responsibilities in achieving the organization’s ESG goals.

Traditional manual policy management processes can be time-consuming and prone to errors. But this is another area where AI can help organizations to address these challenges and achieve their GRC/ESG goals more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

5 ways to leverage AI to augment compliance policy & training management

Here are five ways AI technologies can help organizations to achieve their ESG goals by streamlining compliance policy and training management:

1 – (Automated) policy management

An intelligent policy management system can automate the creation, review, and updating of organizational policies and procedures. This ensures that documents (and other Compliance materials) are consistent, up-to-date, and aligned with the organization’s goals.