It is now hard to find a compliance product that does not mention AI on its home page. Some of those claims describe features that genuinely change a team’s day. Others describe a roadmap, or a chatbot bolted onto a help page. Telling them apart is a buyer skill worth developing.
Where AI genuinely helps
There are tasks where machine assistance is no longer hype -- it is simply how good tools work:
- Alert triage. Ranking screening hits by likely relevance so analysts open the serious ones first.
- Classification suggestions. Proposing a code from product attributes, with the reasoning attached for a human to confirm.
- Document extraction. Pulling structured data from invoices and shipping documents that used to be keyed by hand.
- Anomaly detection. Flagging a transaction that does not resemble your normal pattern.
Where the hype outruns reality
Be skeptical when a vendor implies AI makes the compliance decision. A regulator will not accept “the model said so” as a defense, and a vendor who blurs that line is selling comfort, not capability.
AI can draft the decision and rank the queue. It cannot own the decision. The accountability stays human.
Questions that cut through the slide
- Which specific tasks does the AI perform today, in the shipping product -- not on the roadmap?
- Can a user see why the model made a suggestion?
- Can a human override it, and is that override recorded?
- What happens when the model is wrong, and who is accountable then?
A vendor with real AI features answers these quickly and concretely. A vendor with marketing AI gets vague exactly here.
The bottom line
AI in compliance is real, useful and worth paying for -- when it drafts, ranks and extracts. It becomes a liability the moment it is sold as the thing that decides. Buy the assistant; keep the judgment.