AI in regulatory compliance – friend or foe?

January 16, 2025

News on artificial intelligence comes every day in all fields of knowledge. Some are improvements on services, products and gadgets that are already parts of our lives, such as most search engines and online retail applications. For example, Vasco Electronics has recently launched a universal translation device with 108 languages powered by 10 AI-based translation engines and free internet – an improvement on the already useful Google Translate. Others are impressive initial breakthroughs with the potential to reshape industries, like Open AI’s Dall – E art created by machine learning systems. AI is here to stay and will likely only get better at its job, whatever this job may be. In fact, Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute claims that AI will beat humans at almost anything in about 45 years. In particular, to be proficient at writing high school essays by 2026 and performing surgeries by 2053.

 In our conversations with customers, we at Citation Compliance™ often discuss the risk and benefits of AI for the compliance industry. Do regulatory compliance professionals need to worry about AI taking their jobs away? Or will the advancement of AI create more opportunities for regulatory compliance professionals?

From our point of view, thinking about AI replacing human experts completely in the field of regulatory compliance would be incorrect. The benefit of AI (in its current state) is the ability to process massive amounts of data in seconds looking for meaningful patterns. Regulatory documents are perfectly suited for consumption by an AI algorithm since they are naturally structured (i.e., the machine will distinguish between the title, clauses, and the rest of the body of the document). So, monitoring for changes and updates is something an AI–based solution will do with relative ease.  As the number of regulations grows, keeping track of all the changes in all the jurisdictions of interest can be outsourced to AI. However, this is but a fraction of the scope of work of a regulatory expert. The higher value aspect of interpretation and application of regulations needs to stay the prerogative of human experts. Given the state of technological evolution now, in the short to medium term, we see the application of AI as a hybrid man + machine approach with humans relying on AI to automate and optimize the intake of compliance-related information for more efficient decision making.  

That said, automation of compliance monitoring is what Citation Manage™ has delivered since 1996. We have always used a hybrid approach since our solution is based on a thorough discovery process, posing hundreds of questions to all the stakeholders of regulatory compliance at a company. We involve people who are affected by regulations and need to comply with requirements as part of their job, as well as people who need to be aware of the regulations. The regulatory expertise uncovered in the discovery process is then used by Citation Manage™ to create a pipeline of relevant EHS data and keep it updated with tasks to complete to stay in compliance. In any given month Citation Manage™ processes thousands of updates per jurisdiction and suggests the relevant ones. Compliance professionals will then execute their decision based on the prompts from the system, making it an efficient hybrid solution.

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