Regulatory changes can be disruptive for businesses. Staying informed about new legislation and changing your compliance policies accordingly often cause significant stress for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams. As regulatory requirements continue to evolve, organizations face growing compliance risk tied to data security, reporting obligations and enforcement actions.
Fortunately, technology can help, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Learn how AI for GRC teams enables organizations to manage risk and respond more quickly to the evolving regulatory landscape.
The Impact of Regulatory Change
Regulatory changes occur frequently and at every level of governance. Regional and national laws change as political realities shift; international regulatory frameworks undergo regular adjustments; industry-specific regulations routinely impact their respective frameworks.
To further complicate matters, it’s common for businesses to be impacted by multiple sets of regulations: regional laws, industry regulations and international standards. As more companies do business on a global scale, we can expect this to become even more prominent.
For GRC professionals, there’s a twofold challenge: meeting the sometimes conflicting regulatory requirements and staying on top of changes in those requirements. AI tools like Onspring’s compliance platform can help with both, improving risk management throughout the process. AI for GRC increases efficiency in compliance workflows and reduces human error, so your team can stay on top of regulatory changes and avoid stiff penalties.
Examples of Regulatory Changes
Here are a few examples of the changes that create challenges for GRC programs, especially for programs that are still reliant on manual GRC processes.
Financial Services
Anti-money laundering, or AML, laws are subject to frequent updates. In the European Union (EU), for example, a new set of AML regulations will require entities like crypto-asset providers, crowdfunding platforms, and professional football clubs to comply with AML regulations. This means that a group of people not previously subject to AML law would need to become compliant with the regulation, necessitating rapid onboarding and training.
Manufacturing
Depending on where they do business, manufacturers are subject to various environmental and sustainability regulations, like rules about air quality and climate risk disclosure.
Those regulations change frequently, depending on political and economic considerations as well as pressure from consumers. Environmental regulations also vary widely from one country to another. GRC teams need to watch regulations closely to stay abreast of changes, not only in the country where they’re headquartered but in every nation where they sell goods or buy supplies.
Healthcare
In the United States, the management of private health data is regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. These rules change frequently to reflect new data privacy concerns. For example, in 2025, HHS proposed changes to HIPAA’s Security Rule. These changes propose to make some cybersecurity standards required rather than addressable. The proposed changes also would require regular audits, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and business associate reviews every year.
The Fallout of Non-Compliance
Non-compliance with regulations comes at a steep cost. Violations of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, can incur fines of up to €20,000 or up to 4% of your company’s annual global revenue. HIPAA violations, civil monetary penalties and settlements have cost covered entities millions
Penalties aren’t the only consideration. A data breach can have a devastating impact on your organization’s reputation, making it difficult to attract new customers, patients or providers.
Artificial Intelligence and Regulatory Compliance
AI in GRC is becoming increasingly necessary among businesses in high-risk sectors. That’s because these tools’ capabilities are perfectly suited to dealing with regulatory challenges. Used correctly, AI speeds up compliance workflows and makes it easier to stay up to date on all the latest changes in the law.
GRC teams already widely use AI to streamline third-party risk management (TPRM) workflows. AI and machine learning (ML) help risk management professionals by generating risk profiles and collecting data to create ever more accurate risk analysis. AI security tools can make predictions about the risk landscape and dynamically adjust their predictions based on new data, supporting stronger risk management.
Now, GRC professionals are also using AI and ML to help with regulatory compliance. Here’s what that looks like.
AI and Regulatory Compliance
AI’s automation and analytics capabilities significantly improve compliance workflows, especially when integrated into AI GRC tools.
Reading and Analyzing Legal Documents
AI’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities can rapidly “read” and understand huge text files. That enables it to quickly make sense of massive legal documents. Where there’s a new regulation issued, AI can quickly parse it and determine its relevance to your organization.
Agentic AI tools can also quickly read other key documents, like third-party security reports and contracts, or audit reports. The best AI tools can contextualize all of this data to come up with clear plans to stay compliant.
Scanning for Regulatory Updates
Combined with NLP abilities, AI automation can continually scan for relevant updates to regulations. Instead of looking for updates once a month or a few times a year, AI tools can scan news sources and legislative updates on a constant basis and issue plain-language alerts whenever there’s something new that impacts your business, filtering out the changes that aren’t applicable to you.
Updating Your Compliance Policies
One of the challenges of regulatory compliance is constantly retraining your teams and updating your internal procedures. Generative AI tools can automatically rewrite the relevant portions of your company’s compliance policies. AI for GRC professionals can even send out notices to your staff and craft training materials.
Monitoring for Regulatory Violations
AI and ML can monitor continuously for signs that your organization has violated a regulation. Without automated tools, this kind of work is both time-consuming and prone to human error. Fortunately, AI is well-suited to constant horizon scanning at a large scale. Even if your organization is large and geographically distributed, AI tools can look for instances of violations.
For example, AI governance tools can track the use of private data to verify that it’s being collected and stored according to the regulations. In regions where the regulations require user consent to use certain data, AI tools can track and store this consent. This capability is increasingly important as organizations deploy generative AI and agentic AI across business functions.
Demonstrating Regulatory Compliance
AI and ML can assist with the reporting burden associated with regulatory compliance. All too often, reporting (or simply answering assessors’ questions) turns into a headache for GRC teams as they hunt down scattered information.
An AI-powered system can store all the data you need in one central repository and easily call it up as needed. Natural language processing tools facilitate plain language searches for data, making it easier to answer questions quickly or create detailed reports. By integrating AI risk management with GRC workflows, organizations can demonstrate compliance more efficiently and reduce stress, especially during audits.
Using AI To Mitigate Risk in Compliance Workflows
The current regulatory landscape is full of risks. Regulations change rapidly, and penalties for non-compliance are stiff. GRC professionals face tough challenges, and they need all the help they can get.
AI for GRC teams is one of the best tools available for navigating the complex regulatory landscape.
Download our free eBook Using AI in Risk Management for GRC Teams to learn more about how AI can manage risk for your organization and how you can protect your data in the age of AI. Effective data governance, consistent compliance and greater efficiency are all within reach. It’s just a question of using the right tools.
