Regulatory changes happen quickly, and they rarely arrive one at a time. Research estimates that more than 200 regulatory updates occur around the world every single day. Over time, the volume adds up quickly. Keeping up with all relevant changes and staying compliant becomes more challenging, especially for governance, risk and compliance (GRC) teams that still track regulatory updates manually.
But using AI for regulatory change management (RCM) can streamline the process. AI-powered RCM platforms, like Onspring, help teams identify and respond to regulatory changes faster than relying on manual effort.
7 Practical Applications of AI in Regulatory Change Management
Using AI in regulatory change management doesn’t replace human judgment. It simply reduces manual work and augments human capabilities. Instead of doing repetitive tasks that AI can handle automatically, GRC teams focus on responsibilities that need unique human skills, such as interpreting regulatory changes.
The technology addresses many of the day-to-day challenges compliance professionals face. Common use cases of AI in regulatory change management include:
1. Summarizing Regulatory Documents
AI in GRC software uses natural language processing (NLP) and optical character recognition (OCR) to scan long legal texts and highlight key points, which is faster than going through regulatory documents manually.
Compliance teams get the main takeaways almost instantly. And as a result, they spend more time interpreting regulatory requirements rather than combing through pages of text.
2. Monitoring Regulatory Updates Automatically
AI can generally be used to monitor regulatory knowledge platforms and send alerts about relevant updates in real time. That means compliance teams no longer have to manually track changes across government websites, industry news or email alerts from regulators.
3. Mapping Regulatory Changes to Internal Policies and Controls Automatically
AI can determine which policies and controls are affected by regulatory changes. It can also automatically assess the impact across the organization and prioritize regulatory updates by risk, so teams know what to address first.
With these insights being available as soon as the government enforces new rules, compliance teams can make decisions faster.
4. Auto-Populating Fields and Generating Regulatory Content
After scanning legal text from regulators, AI can extract critical details, such as regulation name, effective date and affected jurisdiction and fill them out automatically in relevant fields inside the GRC platform.
Many fields in RCM systems also require detailed explanations, such as describing a regulatory change and related risk assessment. Instead of entering the data manually into the platform, teams can ask AI to generate or polish long-form field content. This reduces administrative burden and saves time.
5. Creating Tasks and Workflows
With an AI-powered RCM solution, you can create tasks and workflows from simple questions or prompts, rather than code.
For example, you can ask it to come up with a plan for teams affected by a particular regulation. The AI will generate a plan with all the necessary tasks and assign them to the right team — all automatically.
6. Detecting Duplicates
Duplicate regulatory and compliance records consume unnecessary storage space. They also make it easy for teams and decision-makers to end up with outdated or conflicting information, especially when multiple copies of a file aren’t updated simultaneously.
AI can flag records that appear the same, so GRC teams clean them up before they cause confusion. This helps ensure data in the system is consistent, complete and reliable throughout its lifecycle.
7. Providing Intelligent Recommendations
When a new regulation comes out, compliance teams often run multiple searches in their RCM platforms to see which controls are affected and who owns them. That manual process is not only slow but also increases the risk of missing something important.
AI intelligent recommendations can automatically link relevant controls, employee roles and regulatory requirements. In other words, all information related to a particular regulatory update appears in one place, without having to search manually in the system (you use prompts instead).
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Regulatory Change Management
Why use a regulatory change management platform with AI?
Saves Time
Compliance professionals spend a lot of time manually monitoring regulatory changes each week. In a 2023 global survey of compliance professionals, 62% said that they spend between one and seven hours per week tracking and analyzing regulatory developments.
AI eliminates much of that manual effort by automatically tracking regulatory changes and generating summaries. This can save teams hours each week.
Boosts Productivity
Between 2023 and 2040, a McKinsey study estimates that generative AI could increase labor productivity by 0.1–0.6% every year. The research also shows that the technology has the potential to add $2.6–4.4 trillion in corporate profits worldwide.
Compliance professionals are using generative AI to automate repetitive tasks. The time they’d have spent on manual recurring operations goes to other strategic responsibilities that require human judgment. As a result, productivity increases without hiring more staff.
Improves Accuracy and Efficiency
Manual data entry is prone to mistakes because people get tired or lose focus doing the same thing continuously for a long period. It also becomes inefficient when teams have to work through large volumes of data.
That’s where AI in GRC software like Onspring helps. By auto-populating fields, it eliminates manual data entry and increases accuracy. Studies show that for every 10,000 data entries, automated systems typically make just one to four errors, while humans make between 100 and 400 mistakes. Unlike humans, AI doesn’t get tired when handling large datasets.
Speeds Up Decision Making
Teams might take days to review regulatory changes and decide which controls they affect. With AI, the same process can happen in hours or even minutes, allowing GRC departments to make informed decisions and take necessary actions quickly.
Companies that make smart decisions faster and more consistently tend to outperform their slower competitors financially.
Reduces Costs
Using AI for regulatory change management helps reduce costs related to manual work and human error.
As regulatory workloads continue to grow year after year, AI automation makes it easier and more cost-effective to handle increasing volumes of regulatory data, especially when adding headcount isn’t an option.
Challenges of Using AI in Regulatory Change Management (And How to Overcome Them)
While AI has many applications in regulatory change management, several legitimate concerns continue to limit adoption:
- Trust in AI decisions: Compliance teams may hesitate to rely on AI summaries and impact analysis, especially in high-risk industries. Use AI to support human judgment, not replace it.
- Data quality: AI is only as good as the data it uses. Incomplete or inaccurate records can hurt AI precision. Primary data sources for your AI, such as legal text and information about your workflows, should be accurate and complete.
- Data security and confidentiality: RCM solutions handle sensitive information, such as financial and employee records. Organizations often worry that AI could expose this information to unauthorized parties or store it insecurely. Only use AI tools that meet the highest data security and privacy standards in your industry.
Simplifying and Speeding Up Regulatory Change Management with AI
Using AI in regulatory change management allows compliance teams to do their best work quickly and accurately. With modern GRC software like Onspring, they can use AI to:
- Summarize lengthy regulatory documents quickly and then use the details to auto-populate relevant fields in the system.
- Generate content, records and workflows using text prompts.
- Track regulatory changes and map them to the right internal controls automatically, so compliance professionals can focus on interpreting updates instead of manual tasks.
- Detect duplicate records and find information easily with intelligent recommendations.
To learn more about the role of technology in RCM, download our Building a Regulatory Change Management Program ebook. If you’re ready to set up an AI-powered GRC software in your organization, request a demo today to see how Onspring accelerates regulatory compliance tasks.
