Last updated: 10 Feb 2025 09:00 Posted in:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping companies navigate the fast-growing range of regulation they face and is becoming an essential way for them to make their compliance more consistent, more efficient and more effective.
Jonathan Kirsop, a Partner at law firm Pinsent Masons, explained that regulation governs more aspects of an organisation’s activity than ever before, relating to health and safety, data protection, cyber security, bribery, fraud and consumer protection.
He said: “It is essential that organisations reduce their risk in these areas, catalogue their efforts in case of a breach, and co-ordinate activity between many different functions and their compliance department. But that is becoming too big a job to do manually with any kind of efficiency.
“Large language models (LLMs), the incredibly powerful learning computer systems at the heart of generative AI, can help with the process of gathering and collating the information that business units must provide to identify and quantify risk as a precursor to lessening it.
“This is currently a highly manual process in most organisations. This means lots of forms with free text fields being seen and handled by several people, all of whom are required to read and amend that text. What the text says is entirely up to those people, meaning that standardisation is rare and the reliability of the information variable.”
The first job AI can help with is reviewing the tools used to gather information. It can help hone questions, surveys and forms so that they contain more standardised information and fewer free text fields, increasing the standardisation of the output.
This in itself is a major bonus because that output, once standardised, is far easier for AI systems themselves to organise, cross reference and interrogate.
He added: “This work also makes information gathering less human-intensive, as what the system seeks is their judgement rather than hours of their label repeating written information.
“Until now the function of the AI is almost like a seconded member of the compliance team working with colleagues processing data; financial information; or IT systems to ensure risks are identified, recorded, understood and mitigated.
“But standardisation of the collected data is equally important, and here AI can operate as a kind of overseeing intelligence of the whole organisation’s risks.”
Kirsop said that data protection is one good area to start – it is relatively independent of other functions and the information your organisation already has is likely to be accurate.
He said: “Data quality may be one of the biggest barriers to effective creation of these systems. An AI system trained on poor quality data – inconsistent or factually wrong or incomplete – will compound errors faster than humans can fix them.
“But investing resource now to create a high quality system to both gather and process compliance data is an investment that will pay off in increased efficiency and effectiveness long into the future.”
“It is essential that organisations reduce their risk in these areas, catalogue their efforts in case of a breach, and co-ordinate activity between many different functions and their compliance department. But that is becoming too big a job to do manually with any kind of efficiency."
Jonathan Kirsop, Partner at Pinsent Masons