Does AI Help or Hinder Compliance Efforts?
Technology is something of a double-edged sword. The use of AI technology by cybercriminals can leave businesses more vulnerable to legitimate-seeming scams and cyberattacks; at the same time, AI can help defend against those attacks. Compliance standards are put in place to protect not just businesses but also their consumers and investors. These days, companies are responsible for protecting their data and that of their investors and customers, and ensuring they are compliant can put them in a position where they are better defended from potential threats.
Ultimately, businesses should remember that the biggest vulnerability of their organization to cybersecurity threats is not any system or technology they use but their employees. After all, any cybersecurity measure is only as secure as the employees that use it. Without proper education and training to teach employees how to properly follow standards or use the tools provided to them, the impact on the company’s security posture will be minimal.
Improve Compliance and Stay Compliant
Indeed, the goal of companies to improve compliance should be to eliminate as much of the burden as possible from employees. One method that many companies have found success with in this regard is outsourcing their compliance management to a third-party administrator. A third-party administrator acts as a trusted intermediary between the company and its investors, ensuring that all business compliance standards are met. This also allows the company’s leadership and employees to spend more time focusing on the core tasks of the business rather than jumping through compliance hoops.
Some companies have also turned to artificial intelligence (AI) technology as a tool to help them improve compliance management. Using AI comes with significant savings to companies, as staffing a team of trained and experienced compliance specialists is costly and still comes with the associated risks of human error. Most businesses, until they reach a point where they have a substantial amount of employees to manage, would be best served by using an AI-powered compliance tool backed by an outsourced, third-party administrator.
AI to Detect Cybersecurity Threats
The primary application for which AI technology has been used in compliance is the detection of cybersecurity threats. Standards protecting against cyberattacks are becoming increasingly important in compliance as cyberattacks become more complex and have more devastating consequences for companies and their investors.
Proponents of AI have touted its ability to process data much more quickly than a human team and, in cybersecurity, speed is of the utmost importance. A matter of minutes can make or break a company’s ability to respond to a cybersecurity threat before it becomes a cyberattack. Quick identification by an AI program allows the human team to respond quickly to the threat.
However, some critics have questioned the accuracy of AI tools for cybersecurity purposes. One of the biggest limitations of using AI-powered compliance tools is that they are just that: Tools.
Artificial intelligence is still—and will be for the foreseeable future—dependent on human input and support. Although AI can process data much faster than the human brain, it must have a source from which it can pull that data, typically databases maintained by humans. As such, an AI program used to identify cybersecurity threats can only identify threats already known to human operators.
Furthermore, the use of an AI-powered system often requires a human team to back it up. Once AI identifies a cybersecurity threat, a human worker must take action to ensure the system is adequately reinforced and that the threat never comes to fruition as a full-fledged attack. And should the AI system begin to display false negative or false positive results—or falter completely—a human team must be in place to accurately identify and assess potential threats.
AI Requires its own Compliance Standards
Another challenge in the use of AI-powered tools for compliance is that, like any other tool, artificial intelligence requires compliance standards of its own. Standards must be put in place to ensure that employees are using artificial intelligence tools responsibly and are not introducing further points of vulnerability into the system. But with these standards in place, businesses can successfully integrate artificial intelligence into their operations for their compliance needs without further compromising their data.
Although it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to foil wrongdoers who hope to attack the company and its stakeholders, investing in high-quality tools and adhering to strict compliance standards can prepare them to handle even the most complex cybersecurity threats. If implemented properly, an AI-powered system can be a valuable tool to protect the company. Still, business leaders must be cautious—as they should with any new tool—that they are utilizing the technology responsibly.
