Can AI Ease Compliance Officers’ Workloads?

New human rights due diligence legislation. Emerging AI regulations. Stricter financial crime directives. These developments and more should leave organizations in no doubt that their reporting requirements have become more onerous than ever in 2025.

In our latest blog, we look at how compliance officers are overcoming this challenge by leveraging AI to produce more reports in less time. We also explore how a Responsible AI model helps to improve the reliability of reports to gain the confidence of managers, investors and regulators.

Why reporting needs a company’s attention even more in 2025

Ask any compliance officer and they will tell you that demands for reporting have skyrocketed in recent years. The most obvious driver for this has been the introduction of new regulatory requirements which demand that companies publish reports on various activities. Recent examples include:

• The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which came into force in July 2024, mandates companies to publish information on how they identify and address human rights and environmental impacts in their operations and supply chains.
• Three major stock exchanges in China introduced new guidelines for listed companies in 2024, which require them to report on sustainability-related information such as their impacts on climate change and natural ecosystems.
• A bill currently being considered by Brazil’s parliament would require technology providers to conduct a risk assessment of their AI systems and report on how they comply with requirements around transparency, data management, and information security – or face a fine of up to 2% of their annual revenue.

Moreover, due diligence, compliance and analysis teams are facing internal demands from their c-suite to provide research-based, data-driven reports help drive business opportunities. They may be asked for evaluations of potential M&A targets; new markets to enter; key information about competitors and their financial health; possible patents; and more. This development recognizes the vital role of compliance and research as a positive driver of new business. But it adds yet more tasks to an already stretched and often under-resourced area of the organization.

The result of these external and internal trends is that analysts now need to produce more (and more frequent) reports on multiple topics, including:

• Disclosures mandated by the regulator, such as the need to publish actions to identify and prevent modern slavery, or climate-related information.
• Reports on enhanced due diligence carried out after screening has determined a third party or customer to be high risk.
• Briefings demanded by the company’s board to give an overview of risk-relevant information on a certain topic to facilitate a quick and clear decision by management.
• Analysis requested by the sales or commercial team of a prospective new investment or M&A target, or a planned expansion into a new industry or jurisdiction.

MORE: Technology and data to monitor global risk and find new opportunities

How AI can make reporting more effective and efficient

Growing reporting demands mean that companies need to monitor a wide range of data sets then summarize the main findings in a clear report tailored for an internal or external audience. This is hugely demanding of staff time because a report needs to contain all relevant information while remaining as concise as possible and delivered with accuracy in the preferred format for each audience. Companies have found that the solution to this challenge can be found in the capabilities of AI.

AI tools can automate reporting to a significant degree by rapidly pulling together various sources of information into a first draft of a report which follows a coherent structure with logical grouping of themes. This saves the analyst significant time in generating the report, allowing them to focus on reviewing and editing a detailed draft before sharing it with management or regulatory authorities as appropriate.

One area where reporting has already been changed by AI is in the financial services industry. A recent KPMG survey of financial leaders found that 72% of financial companies already use AI in financial reporting, and 99% are expected to use it by 2027. But organizations in all sectors can benefit from using AI to improve their reporting capabilities.

MORE: Top ways financial services teams are using generative AI

Responsible AI: Ensuring AI-driven reporting meets high ethical standards

While AI has enormous potential for reporting, it also brings new risks for companies to manage. If AI tools are not transparently understood and powered by credible and accurate data, their outputs can be biased or even inaccurate. The use of opaquely sourced data also opens organizations to potential enforcement action for breaches of data privacy and information security.

This creates a problem for reporting because these reports are among the most important documents an organization will produce. They are used as the basis for significant investments or strategic decisions, and as formal declarations of a company’s compliance with a regulatory requirement. If AI introduces biases or errors into a report, this could create new regulatory risks for companies – which is a long way from the report’s original aim of meeting a regulator’s requirement.

The best way for companies to ensure their reporting is accurate is to implement a Responsible Business approach to AI. That means bringing in AI tools from trustworthy providers who have set out ethical principles and using credible data that has been collected in an ethical way and licensed for specific use in AI tools. Responsible AI allows companies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their reporting while winning the confidence of each report’s recipient.

MORE: The main reasons AI projects fail—and how to avoid being next

Implement Responsible AI reporting with credible data and technology from LexisNexis®

As an established data provider for over 50 years, LexisNexis has extensive, long-standing – and in some cases, exclusive – content licensing agreements with publishers worldwide. We supply data to enable you to advance your goals while recognizing and respecting the intellectual property rights of our licensed partners. Our transparency around our trusted data should give you confidence to leverage it responsibly for your own AI initiatives and upgrade the effectiveness and efficiency of your reporting.

For example, our new AI-powered research platform, Nexis+ AI™, combines time-saving generative AI tools with our vast library of trusted sources. This saves you time on core research tasks like document analysis, article summarization, and report generation, and helps drive forward your capacity to summarize and report in a responsible way.

Download our toolkit to learn more about the how your company can realize the potential of AI while staying ahead of evolving regulations.