Where AI Is Helping Risk and Compliance Teams

For risk and compliance teams, the early value of artificial intelligence is showing up in familiar operational pain points: summarizing large volumes of information, spotting patterns across risk data, preparing for risk and control self-assessments, and giving experienced teams more time for judgment. 

In the ProSight Executive Report, “AI Innovation in Banking,” Frank Devlin’s article on how risk and compliance teams are using AI highlights themes from ProSight’s Governance, Compliance, and Operational Resiliency Conference. Across sessions with leaders from banks of all sizes, the recurring themes were simplification, optimization, and connected insights. 

For institutions deciding where AI belongs in risk and compliance, the report points to several useful priorities: 

Start with the busy work. Jennifer Erickson, senior vice president and director of operations risk at Zions Bancorporation, said AI can help non-financial risk teams focus on data-heavy, manual, or repetitive tasks. At Zions, she said, AI is being used to identify patterns and themes across operational risk events and losses, customer complaints and issues, key risk indicators, and control failures. She also pointed to potential uses in compliance monitoring and regulatory change. 

Use AI to connect the dots. Bob Cataldo, head of U.S. operational risk management at BMO Financial Group, said, “One of the biggest lifts that we’re going to get from AI is really connecting disparate data sources across different functions and pulling out the things that we should be looking at.” For institutions trying to make risk management more forward-looking, that cross-functional view may be one of the most valuable uses. 

Improve preparation and discussion quality. Panelists described AI helping teams synthesize risk information, spot themes, prepare for risk and control self-assessments, identify key risks, detect gaps between policy and procedure, and improve meeting quality. Avani Parekh, executive risk advisor–special initiatives for the COO group at TD Bank, said AI “has given me more time to actually think through and make more informed judgments.” 

Find the compliance use cases. Sessions also highlighted AI’s potential in anti-money laundering, sanctions screening, suspicious activity report preparation, complaint resolution, risk control mapping, and summarizing regulatory updates. 

Keep people in the loop. The report keeps human oversight at the center. Panelists warned that people can become overly reliant on AI, fail to question outputs, or let skills atrophy. Clean, governed, and well-structured data also remains essential. 

The takeaway: AI’s value in risk and compliance is showing up in the work that slows teams down: gathering information, finding patterns, summarizing developments, preparing discussions, and triaging issues. Turning that value into durable improvement requires strong governance, reliable data, and people with the expertise to challenge what the technology produces.