Build a Regulatory IT Response Engine

Use an AI-enabled approach to rapidly respond to evolving regulations.

Analyst perspective

Streamline your regulatory compliance efforts through an AI-enabled approach.

The rise of various global compliance standards has increased the complexity of managing and adhering to multiple regulations. Regulations are increasing across jurisdictions, mainly enforced to respond to emerging technologies and address consumer demands to better protect their data. This rapid change has left organizations struggling to keep pace, citing traditional compliance approaches as insufficient to address modern regulatory amendments.

Furthermore, challenges with translating regulatory requirements into actionable IT controls and initiatives have put a strain on IT leaders’ regulatory compliance efforts. The lack of a structured view on regulatory changes, coupled with the manual, intensive processes to support compliance efforts, impacts organizations’ ability to respond quickly to regulations. This comes at a time where stricter enforcement and increased fines by jurisdictions have transformed noncompliance into not only a reputational risk but also a financial and operational threat to the organization.

With many organizations finding compliance complexity a hindrance to transformation priorities, action must be taken to adopt a resilient approach to managing diverging regulations. This blueprint provides guidance on developing a unified, AI-enabled approach to respond to regulatory changes. Its methodology will help organizations track their existing compliance effort, transform new regulatory requirements into actionable IT controls, and develop an effective IT action plan to implement initiatives, ultimately supporting their compliance efforts. This adaptable framework ensures evolving regulations can be addressed. It supports IT leaders in showing their IT response to adhere to requirements and supports the overall organizational compliance program.

Ahmad Jowhar
Senior Research Analyst, Security & Privacy Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Info-Tech Insight
Static models no longer meet the pace of change of regulations. Leverage advanced AI tools to develop a rapid, continuous, and adaptive IT response plan to effectively govern your compliance efforts.

Challenge

Keeping pace with regulatory changes is a top priority for organizations

• The rise of emerging technologies and changes in customer demand has shifted the regulatory landscape, with regulations being enacted at higher speed, volume, and complexity than ever before.
• This has impacted CIOs’ ability to support compliance teams in effectively responding to changes in regulatory requirements that require IT action.
• Organizations are struggling to operationalize compliance requirements, as current methods are not sufficient to effectively translate regulatory text to actionable IT initiatives at scale.
• Lack of oversight of overlapping regulatory requirements impacts organizations’ growth initiatives, as additional time and resources are allocated to develop and implement redundant controls.

85% of organizations report increased compliance complexity.
Source: PwC, 2025

69% of organizations find the complexity and velocity of regulations as key challenges to their compliance efforts.
Source: World Economic Forum, 2025

77% of organizations cite regulatory complexity as a key factor negatively impacting growth initiatives.
Source: PwC, 2025

Common obstacles

Lack of automation hampers rapid regulatory response effort

• Regulatory response processes often operate in silos, with no communication or collaboration among departments, resulting in an unstructured view of regulatory change within an organization.
• Current regulatory response processes lack the capability to scale their compliance effort due to outdated infrastructure and manual processes, resulting in increased time, cost, and effort.
• Stringent compliance deadlines, coupled with various IT dependencies, place pressure on CIOs to efficiently prioritize initiatives to respond to and meet requirements.
• A lack of tooling and operating models for continuous control makes it challenging for organizations to demonstrate continuous compliance, which requires ongoing monitoring, testing, and reporting.

77% of compliance teams rely on manual or outdated processes.
Source: Regology, 2025

65% of compliance leaders cite technology and automation as being essential to reduce compliance complexity.
Source: Thomson Reuters, 2023

What is a regulatory IT response engine?

An AI-enabled regulatory response, strengthened by human oversight

• To address the key challenges and obstacles of responding to evolving regulations, a proactive and repeatable process is required to ensure compliance efforts are appropriately met.
• A regulatory IT response engine is a structured framework that helps organizations identify, analyze, and respond to regulations that have an impact on IT or require an IT action.
• It acts as a centralized mechanism for monitoring regulatory updates, assessing organizational impact, and translating requirements into actionable IT controls and initiatives – improving alignment between legal, compliance, and technology teams.
• The response engine ensures regulatory changes are addressed consistently, efficiently, and with traceability across the organization.
• Its two main components are AI assisted and human oversight elements that support a regulatory response effort:
  • AI Assisted: AI-enabled tools that automatically identify applicable regulations and translate regulatory requirements into IT actions.
  • Human Oversight: Subject matter experts that review AI’s output to ensure accuracy and proper interpretation.

Info-Tech’s methodology for building an effective regulatory response engine

Insight summary

Gain clarity on developing an effective IT action plan to respond to emerging regulations.
Static models no longer meet the pace of change of regulations. Leverage AI tools to develop a rapid, continuous, and adaptive IT response plan to effectively govern your compliance efforts.

From compliance to conformance.
Although most regulations specify the required conformance levels, organizations’ regulatory responses are influenced by various internal and external factors. An effective response plan requires a shared understanding of the desired conformance level for each regulation.

Leverage AI to support regulatory compliance.
Leverage AI tools to streamline your regulatory response efforts and develop an IT action plan to ensure the right initiatives are implemented.

Prioritize IT initiatives to avoid noncompliance implications.
Prioritize your IT action plan based on initiative timelines and dependencies to ensure compliance efforts are implemented to meet stringent regulatory deadlines.

Balance AI-informed output with governance expertise.
Although leveraging the power of AI will streamline regulatory response efforts, a robust response plan requires competent human intervention throughout the process to validate AI’s output and ensure compliance requirements are met.

Beyond IT: Compliance as a shared responsibility.
Address compliance as a shared accountability, not just a technical checkbox, to better position your organization in managing risk, adapting to change, and sustaining regulatory trust.

Blueprint deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Regulation Inventory Tool
Capture all your applicable regulations that require an IT action.

Regulatory Response IT Action Plan Tool
Develop your IT actions to achieve regulatory compliance.

Compliance Program Template
Capture the roles, responsibilities, and processes required for managing IT compliance requirements.

Key deliverable:
Regulatory Response Communication Deck
Capture your regulatory compliance efforts and IT action plan to meet requirements.

Blueprint benefits

Measure the value of this blueprint

A rapid regulatory IT response plan will have a measurable impact on your program

*Source: COBIT 2019 Framework, Governance and Management Objectives

Executive brief case study

INDUSTRY: Food & Beverage

SOURCE: Payzaar, 2025

Danone

Operating in over 55 countries with more than 100,000 employees, Danone faced significant challenges managing its decentralized payroll operations. Each country used its own system, resulting in over 35 different payroll solutions with inconsistent controls and varying regulatory requirements. This fragmentation limited global oversight, made it difficult to establish KPIs, and increased audit and compliance risks.

To address this, Danone partnered with Payzaar to standardize and automate payroll processes through a unified platform.

Results

Partnering with Payzaar, Danone unified payroll operations, automated compliance checks, integrated local regulatory requirements, and standardized workflows. This consolidation improved efficiency, strengthened governance, and enabled scalable, reliable global compliance management.

Key Benefits

Improved Operational Efficiency

Improved Data Quality

Improved Compliance and Audit Readiness

Strengthened Governance

Enabled Scalable Compliance

Phase 1

Define Regulatory Requirements

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

1.1 Define organizational profile

1.2 Define conformance approach

1.3 Develop regulation inventory

1.4 Assess current conformance levels

Outcome:

• Applicable list of regulations with an IT action
• Desired regulation conformance levels defined
• Regulation current state assessed
• Roles and responsibilities established

This phase involves the following participants:

• CIO
• Compliance
• Legal
• Audit
• Security & Privacy

Define applicable regulations

Gain clarity on your current regulatory landscape and efforts

• Prior to developing a regulatory IT action plan, organizations need to understand their current regulatory landscape and compliance efforts.
• Establishing a clear understanding of your organization’s structure, operations, data flows, and risk environments will ensure your regulatory efforts are mapped to business context.
• Defining your compliance approach clarifies the governance, roles and responsibilities, and assurance expectations, establishing an overarching framework for how organizations will meet regulatory expectations.
• Periodically identifying new regulations that require an IT action will ensure a single source of truth outlines all applicable regulations, helping teams accurately develop and prioritize initiatives to satisfy requirements.
• Leveraging subject matter expertise to review and validate conformance levels and assessing current efforts will enable transparent understanding of current compliance posture and inform risk-based remediation plans influenced by compliance gaps

1.1 Define organizational profile

1 hour

Gather the required participants and use the Regulation Inventory Tool to define your organization’s profile.

1. Identify the relevant variables that will define your organizational profile.
2. Leverage the output to help inventory your applicable regulations.

Download the Regulation Inventory Tool