Faster, safer compliance with agentic AI

For organisations operating in complex governance environments, robust governance is essential to ensuring operational resilience and regulatory compliance. Risk and Compliance teams must continually keep internal policies and controls aligned with an ever-evolving landscape of external regulations, such as listing rules.

Previously, this process involved a highly manual workflow where employees spent significant time monitoring regulatory changes, identifying the impact of such changes and updating policy documents to reflect new requirements.

To address the need for a more streamlined and efficient process that reduces compliance costs, PwC Singapore’s AI Hub designed and deployed a specialised Agentic Compliance Monitor (ACM) as a proof-of-concept (POC), tailored to help organisations manage regulatory change in real-time.

The POC demonstrated how a Risk and Compliance team could approach regulatory updates in a more structured and consistent manner, significantly reducing reliance on manual monitoring.

Unlike traditional automation, the ACM employs a multi-agent AI framework capable of complex reasoning. It breaks down the compliance workflow into distinct tasks: monitoring changes in regulations, assimilating relevant internal policies, and suggesting controls to reflect the new requirements.

The system is built around human-centric validation and is designed to support, not replace, the Risk and Compliance team, with human review and validation of AI-generated outputs before any action is taken. The ACM dashboard acts as an interface for the AI to generate detailed gap analyses, identify specific design control gaps and offer potential enhancements.

In the POC, the ACM demonstrated the ability to shift effort away from manual reviews towards focused validation and review of identified gaps, resulting in a more reliable and robust review process. The AI does not replace human judgement; rather, it augments expertise, empowering Risk and Compliance teams to right-size their efforts against the risks that truly matter.

The POC showed how this approach can support more consistent identification of potential regulatory gaps while preserving full human oversight.

The ACM turns complex text analysis into a user-friendly visual dashboard, providing a Risk and Compliance team with real-time access to their compliance status. It highlights regulatory impacts and priority levels, enabling leadership and functional heads to distinguish minor administrative discrepancies from critical compliance risks.

The system also suggests remediation deadlines and provides leading-practice benchmarks. As part of the POC, this enabled quicker visibility of key risk areas without the need for manual consolidation of findings, allowing the focus to be on reviewing severity and implications instead of manually searching for control gaps.

At the POC stage, the solution demonstrated clear efficiency and coverage improvements, showing the potential to significantly reduce the operational timeline for compliance checks:

• Significantly faster reviews: Increased efficiency in compliance mapping by more than 75%, transforming a process that previously took three to four days into one completed within four hours.
• Enhanced scope: Through continuous 24/7 monitoring of regulatory changes and systematically mapping them against internal policies and controls, the AI solution enabled broader, ongoing compliance coverage that was previously impractical through manual methods.
• Strategic resource allocation: With regulatory change management fully automated, Risk and Compliance teams could redirect an estimated 60–70% of time previously spent on manual monitoring of regulatory requirements towards higher-value validation and strategic judgment.

The successful POC has laid a strong foundation for potential broader adoption. Building on its proven effectiveness, the ACM exemplifies how AI agents can be harnessed across various sectors, from financial services to healthcare, and in companies of varying degrees of maturity, whether pre-IPO or publicly listed.

As the capability expands to additional business units and integrates global regulatory data, the tool is positioned to evolve into a comprehensive regulatory intelligence engine. With applications across functions, such as Legal, Procurement, and Operations, it enables organisations to move from reactive to proactive compliance, supported by ongoing innovation from PwC Singapore’s AI Hub. As regulatory complexity continues to increase, this AI-driven capability will provide a scalable foundation for maintaining consistent and robust governance in line with organisational growth and change.