AI agents help financial firms respond to regulatory change

During a webinar hosted with Workday, regional sales director Patrick O’Donoghue and principal enterprise architect Daniel Pridham described how AI agents can gather contract clauses, supplier records, transaction histories, organisational charts, internal policies and past process decisions to build a consolidated view for compliance work.

The speakers noted regulatory changes typically trigger work across finance, procurement, legal, human resources, operations and IT. Firms must identify affected contracts and suppliers, decide whether customer relationships require review, determine reporting data needs and assess whether processes or headcount must change.

According to the presenters, the main obstacle is the time required to locate relevant information across systems, align stakeholders and coordinate follow-up actions. Agents can reduce that time by assembling dispersed data and linking the consequences of a new rule across teams.

The panel outlined integration steps for agents: connect agents to enterprise data sources, set rules for data access and validation, and create workflows for handling agent findings. Typical actions include automated document scanning, mapping affected entities and processes, flagging high-priority items for human review, and generating task lists and reports for downstream teams.

Agents can also keep audit trails that show how conclusions were reached and what actions were taken, which can assist reporting and audits.

Key stakeholders for an agent-enabled response include compliance officers, legal counsel, finance managers, procurement and vendor teams, HR for workforce impacts, IT for systems and data access, operations for process changes and senior leaders for resourcing decisions. Data owners and reporting teams must be involved to ensure input quality.

The presenters described an end-to-end approach starting with rapid detection of a regulatory change and automated ingestion of rule text and related materials. An agent-led impact map would identify affected contracts, suppliers, processes and reporting requirements. Human experts then review and confirm priorities before agents assign tasks, update workflows and produce required filings or internal reports.

Final steps include documenting decisions for audit, measuring time-to-compliance and setting up ongoing monitoring so future changes can be assessed more quickly. The panel provided practical use cases for agents in compliance workflows and discussed the technical connections and governance needed for implementation.