AI for Regulatory Compliance: Enhancing Accountability in Public Governance

New AI tools are changing the compliance game, magnifying the government's capacity to regulate entire industries and enabling a smarter, more streamlined, more effective, more transparent compliance art. In areas like financial services, regulatory enforcement, and public health, AI-based tools are helping human experts find more fraud, foretell future violations, and analyze heaps of documents with improved accuracy and speed. The most sophisticated of these systems can sift through enormous mountains of data to identify patterns of bad actor behavior that no human could ever hope to detect. Automation is a huge second piece of the pie, too. Automating document review and oversight on active processes eliminates an entire layer of administrative burden, enabling agencies to operate with speed and responsiveness. Adding AI capabilities behind the curtain of these systems will allow regulators to move from a reactive/regulatory stance to a preventative one. It will aid in stopping dangers before they have a chance to mature into larger, more dangerous threats. Therein lies the opportunity for a more anticipatory, more participatory, more agile, and fairer future of city governance. It’s been an amazing opportunity, but it hasn’t come without its challenges. Fairness, algorithmic bias, and ensuring that decisions made behind the curtain are clearly open to public scrutiny are all major issues that society still has to critically engage with. As these real-world examples depict, with intentionality and smart implementation, AI driven by a diverse set of humans can contribute to the creation of deeper, stronger, and more equitable regulation that protects people and increases transparency in decision-making.