Sunday, December 14, 2025
Reinventing compliance: from burden to breakthrough
If you lead compliance in a mid-size enterprise, you probably feel it every week. The rulebook keeps expanding while your team, tools and time do not. According to PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025, 85% of companies say compliance requirements have become more complex in the last three years and 77% report a negative business impact as a result, from slower product launches to delayed market entry. The message is clear, the old model of more people and more checklists is reaching its limits.
This article distills what the new leaders are doing differently and how AI, especially generative AI, turns compliance from bottleneck into accelerator.
PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025
The compliance nightmare for companies
Regulation now touches every function, cybersecurity and privacy, AML and anti-bribery, antitrust, ESG disclosure, tax, AI governance, third-party oversight, sector rules. Change is constant and cross border. PwC’s 2025 survey highlights the pattern, rising complexity, management attention stretched thin and execution drag on transformation programs. Data is a major culprit, 63% cite fragmented and disaggregated data as a challenge to using information effectively in compliance. Technology investment helps, but only when it tackles the cognitive work of regulatory risk management, not just routing tasks.
What hurts the most in 2025
The heaviest recurring processes are the same across industries. They are mandatory, high stakes and still too manual.
Regulatory risk assessment
Multi jurisdiction risk mapping still relies on interviews and spreadsheets. With disjointed data, updates lag behind regulatory changes and organizational shifts. For mid size teams, this stalls product approvals, certifications and partner onboarding.
Controls monitoring and testing
Evidence chasing, sampling, documenting exceptions and writing audit ready narratives consume disproportionate time. Many teams remain reactive, discovering gaps during audits or incidents rather than through continuous oversight.
KYC and third party due diligence
Volume, varied data sources and inconsistent quality turn business partner checks into a bottleneck. Boards and regulators expect more coverage, faster decisions and ongoing monitoring, not one-off screenings.
Policies, procedures and reporting
Codes, policies, control descriptions, risk matrices, periodic reports and training content need revision with every change in law or business model. Maintaining consistency across languages, units and systems is a grind.
Core process | Why it hurts today | What changes with genAI | Impact for mid-size teams |
|---|---|---|---|
Regulatory risk assessment | Manual mapping across jurisdictions, stale spreadsheets | Rapid extraction of obligations from laws and policies, risk scenario generation and scoring | Fresher risk maps, faster decisions for launches and certifications |
Controls monitoring | Evidence collection and sampling by hand, reactive findings | Automated document requests, triage of exceptions, anomaly flags and remediation prompts | More coverage, fewer surprises at audit time |
KYC and third party | High volume screening, fragmented sources | Consolidated screening summaries, risk rationales and recommended actions | Shorter cycle times without lowering the bar |
Policies and reporting | Rewriting content repeatedly, version friction | Draft policies and reports tailored to risks and frameworks, consistent language | Weeks shaved off updates and board packs |
The rise of the compliance pioneer
A small but growing cohort of companies is proving that compliance can speed the business rather than slow it. Only 7% self describe as leading today, yet 38% aim to reach leadership within three years. Pioneers share four traits, they embed compliance in product and service development early, they run connected compliance ecosystems where data flows end to end, they use data for decisions not only for reporting, and they recognize compliance as a strategic capability, not a cost center.
Technology at the heart of modern compliance
Technology is now a core design choice, not an add on. PwC reports that 82% of companies plan to invest more in compliance technology, with realized benefits including better visibility of risks (64%), faster identification and response to issues (53%), higher quality reporting (48%), faster decisions (46%) and productivity gains with cost savings (43%). These gains come when tools address information interpretation and judgment support, not just workflow plumbing.
PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025
Where genAI delivers beyond traditional AI
Traditional AI in compliance focused on structured data and transaction anomalies. Generative AI adds the ability to read, reason and draft across unstructured information at scale.
- Collect and analyze unstructured content, regulations, contracts, policies, questionnaires, evidence, emails and minutes.
- Detect and assess non compliance risks, map obligations, outline scenarios, propose likelihood and impact scoring and justify the rationale.
- Generate controls tailored to risks.
- Continuously monitor effectiveness, request evidence on a cadence, detect missing or outdated data, flag deviations and escalate with context.
- Draft and maintain documentation, policies, risk matrices, training outlines and board ready reports that stay consistent across languages and units.
This is not incremental process automation, it is compliance intelligence at scale, with humans firmly in charge of judgment and escalation.
High value use cases to start with
- Regulatory risk assessments, faster obligation identification, risk scoring and heat maps with clear assumptions.
- Control framework design, tailored internal controls and test scripts generated in minutes, ready for subject matter review.
- Third party and KYC reviews, rapid risk summaries, rationale and remediation recommendations, with audit trails.
- Audit preparation, evidence maps and executive summaries that mirror how auditors review programs.
- Regulatory horizon scanning, change summaries that identify which processes and controls are impacted.
Governance matters and the EU’s AI Act sets the tone. Companies should maintain inventories of AI use, define human oversight, document data sources and limitations and ensure security and privacy controls are in place. A responsible AI approach builds trust with regulators and stakeholders.
How Naltilia helps
Naltilia provides an AI powered platform that streamlines and automates regulatory compliance for organizations, which helps mid market teams move from burden to breakthrough without adding headcount.
- Regulatory risk assessment, accelerate identification and scoring of risks, keep registers current across jurisdictions.
- Remediation actions and controls tailored to your frameworks and risk profile, track corrective measures to closure with clear ownership and status.
- Automated data collection, reduce evidence chasing by pulling documentation and organizing it for reviews.
- Compliance workflow automation, standardize reviews, approvals and deadlines so work moves on time.
- Automatic control testing, reduce headcount on manual checks of controls.
- Remediation actions, track corrective measures to closure with clear ownership and status.
If you are building toward leadership in regulatory risk management, these capabilities shorten cycle times and raise the quality bar.
Move from burden to breakthrough
The conclusion from the latest industry evidence is not subtle. Traditional, manual compliance will not keep pace with today’s risk landscape. The companies that will win embed compliance into design and decision making, run connected ecosystems, and use genAI responsibly to create clarity, speed and consistency.
If you want to pilot this approach on your highest value workflows, talk to us. Start your journey with Naltilia, https://calendly.com/iratxe-naltilia/30min