AI agents speed compliance after regulatory change

A recent webinar with Workday examined how AI agents can assemble contracts, supplier records, financial and HR data to speed cross-functional compliance assessments after regulatory changes. The online session featured Patrick O’Donoghue, regional sales director for FSI UKI at Workday, and Daniel Pridham, lead architect for FSI UKI. Jane Cooper moderated.

Regulatory updates often trigger work across finance, procurement, legal, HR, operations and IT. Institutions must find affected contracts, identify suppliers or customers for review, update processes, determine required reporting data and assess costs or workforce needs. The panel identified the main obstacle as locating information across systems and coordinating follow-up tasks.

AI agents can gather business context such as contract terms, supplier records, financial entries, organizational charts, policy documents and process history. By surfacing and linking those data points, agents can shorten the time between a rule announcement and specialist assessment. The panel emphasized that agents do not replace legal, compliance, finance or HR judgment; they reduce manual work in assembling evidence and highlight likely areas for review.

Integrating agents into compliance workflows requires connecting agents to relevant data sources, defining the scope of tasks, setting escalation and approval paths, and ensuring human oversight of recommendations. Agents are most useful at triage and evidence gathering: identifying affected contracts, flagging suppliers, extracting reporting fields and producing summary briefs for specialist teams.

Key stakeholders include compliance and legal teams for rule interpretation, finance for reporting and cost assessment, procurement for supplier impacts, HR for workforce implications, operations and IT for process and system changes, and senior management for governance and resourcing. The panel called for cross-functional ownership so outputs from agents lead to assigned actions and timelines.

A full end-to-end process described in the webinar begins with automated intake of regulatory updates, rapid impact mapping and evidence collection by agents, specialist review and decisioning, task allocation and remediation, and continuous tracking of compliance status and reporting requirements. Governance, secure data access and clear change-management processes are required for agents to operate within existing controls.