Organisations are generating an unprecedented volume of content to engage with their audiences. Whether it’s a promotional email, a social media post, policies, regulatory documentation or customer communications, the amount of digital content that companies produce has skyrocketed. For businesses with a large digital footprint, managing this content is no small task, especially when regulatory compliance is at stake.
A large insurer we spoke with reported an astonishing 800% increase in the volume of digital assets requiring review from Q1 2021 to Q1 2024. This surge is not unique; many businesses are experiencing similar growth, driven by the need to connect with increasingly segmented and diverse audiences. As the volume of content expands, so does the risk of non-compliance with regulations, leading to potential legal consequences, reputational damage, and financial losses.
Current manual, human driven review processes are becoming increasingly unsustainable, with legal and compliance review often being viewed as a “blocker” or “bottleneck” by the rest of the business. To navigate these challenges, businesses are increasingly turning to technologies like AI to help manage review and mitigate these risks.
Managing the Risks of Generative AI
The rise of generative AI has added a new layer of complexity to content compliance. Generative AI tools are capable of creating vast amounts of personalised content at an unprecedented scale. For example, one line of marketing copy combined with one generic marketing image and 10,000 segmented customers can result in 10,000 unique digital assets. While this allows businesses to tailor their messaging to individual customers like never before, it also significantly increases the volume of content that must be monitored for compliance.
Generative AI can produce content in seconds, but ensuring that this content complies with regulatory requirements is a daunting task. The risk of inadvertently producing non-compliant content increases as the volume of content grows.
In-house legal teams are at a crossroads with how they approach the usage of generative AI by the business. They can choose to restrict its use, potentially being perceived as obstacles to innovation by their internal clients, or they can embrace and enable its adoption, recognising the technology's potential to enhance productivity and creativity.
However, embracing generative AI requires a proactive approach to risk management. Legal teams must ensure generative AI is implemented alongside robust systems and protocols to ensure that AI-generated content complies with regulatory requirements and aligns with the organisation's internal standards. By doing so, they can foster innovation while safeguarding the company from potential legal and reputational risks.
Case Study: Equity Trustees deploys Haast to Review ever growing volumes of digital content
Equity Trustees, one of Australia’s leading trustee companies, has successfully deployed Haast’s AI platform to manage its compliance requirements across its digital assets. With a history of over 130 years, Equity Trustees have always been committed to upholding the highest standards of governance and compliance. However, the growing volume of digital content presented a new challenge: how to efficiently monitor and manage this content while ensuring it met all regulatory standards.
Equity Trustees recognised that traditional methods of compliance management were no longer sufficient in the face of this digital explosion. The manual review process was time-consuming, prone to errors, and unable to keep up with the sheer volume of content being produced. To address these challenges, Equity Trustees turned to Haast.
Haast’s platform enabled Equity Trustees to automate the review of vast amounts of digital content, from text to images to video. The AI-driven system can scan thousands of assets in minutes, identifying potential compliance issues and flagging them for further review. This not only reduced the time required to manage compliance but also significantly improved the accuracy and reliability of the process.
For Equity Trustees, the implementation of Haast’s platform has been a game-changer, with an 80% increase in productivity, as their compliance teams could now focus on higher-order issues rather than getting bogged down in routine checks.
Furthermore, being able to apply an end to end compliance platform like Haast across both draft and live content helps ensure a consistent approach to review across the entire asset lifecycle.
By deploying Haast, Equity Trustees has not only enhanced its compliance capabilities but also set a new standard for how trustee companies can leverage AI to manage digital content. The success of this implementation highlights the potential of AI-driven compliance solutions in transforming traditional industries to cope with the pressures of the digital age.
Adapting to changing regulatory positions
As regulatory positions change, the review process becomes even more difficult, a challenge exacerbated by the need to manage the remediation or removal of old content. For businesses, this evolving regulatory landscape presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge lies in staying ahead of rapidly changing rules and guidelines, which can vary not only by region but also by industry. The opportunity, however, is in leveraging advanced technologies like Haast to adapt to these changes more effectively and ensure that all content is compliant from the outset.
A compelling example of this is the experience of Future Super, an ethical superannuation fund committed to investing in climate solutions and social initiatives. As Future Super grew in popularity, so too did the complexity of managing its digital content. The fund needed to ensure that its messaging remained consistent with its ethical values while also adhering to increasingly stringent regulations around environmental claims.
Haast’s AI-powered platform provided Future Super with a robust solution to this challenge. By indexing and scanning all of Future Super’s digital channels, including social media, the platform provides a comprehensive monitoring system that could identify potential live risks nearly instantaneously. This allowed Future Super to quickly correct any high-risk phrases or claims, keeping up with evolving regulations.
The impact of Haast on Future Super’s operations was significant. The platform not only saved the fund countless hours in manual content review but also provided peace of mind by ensuring ongoing compliance without constant oversight. This proactive approach to managing changing regulatory risks enabled Future Super to continue growing its brand as a leader in ethical investing while staying firmly within the bounds of regulatory requirements.
For other businesses, the lesson from Future Super’s experience is clear: adapting to changing regulatory positions requires a combination of vigilance and technological innovation. By leveraging AI-driven tools like Haast, companies can navigate the complexities of modern compliance more effectively, ensuring that their environmental claims are both genuine and compliant with the latest regulatory standards. This not only protects the business from potential legal and reputational risks but also strengthens its credibility in the eyes of increasingly discerning consumers.
The Future of Compliance is AI-Driven
As regulatory requirements continue to evolve and the volume of digital content grows, the need for efficient, scalable compliance solutions has never been greater. Traditional methods of managing compliance are becoming unsustainable in the digital age. Manual reviews, while thorough, are slow and resource-intensive, and they struggle to keep pace with the speed at which digital content is produced. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of regulations, especially in industries like financial services, telecommunications and insurance, makes it nearly impossible for human teams to ensure full compliance across all content without technological assistance.
This is where an AI powered platform like Haast comes in. By automating the legal and compliance review process, Haast enables organisations to scale their operations without compromising on quality or accuracy. The platform’s ability to analyse large volumes of content nearly instantaneously means that businesses can respond more quickly to potential compliance issues, reducing the risk of regulatory breaches.
The Training Flywheel
Early adopters of AI will be amongst the biggest beneficiaries of the “training flywheel”. As organisations begin integrating AI into their operations, the technology continuously learns and improves from the data it processes and human decisions fed into its training set, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of efficiency and accuracy.
The training flywheel applies to both business use cases, as well as legal and compliance specific systems. Taking the example of Haast, users are able to provide the rules running with feedback on performance, and the system is able to adapt over time to meet a company’s unique risk position. Starting early, while content review loads are not yet beyond the tipping point, means systems can be set up properly to enable teams to handle the wave of content that generative AI will generate.
Ready to explore how AI powered marketing compliance can help you? Book a demo today or visit www.haast.io to find out more.