AI: Who’s really in charge?

Many would argue that AI being increasingly available in the workplace is helping to make work faster, but does it work smarter? It certainly proves its value by streamlining routine tasks and processing information, and can also serve as a useful go-to assistant that can make your intranet a fountain of knowledge at your fingertips. However, heavy use of AI is raising regulatory concerns across the ethics and compliance space. If not given the correct guidance and governance, it can make unnecessary and sometimes costly errors.

Organisations cannot afford to confuse a powerful tool with quick solutions, but with employees facing challenges to deliver above and beyond in their day-to-day, it’s understandable that many do turn to AI to ease their workload. The problem with this is that without the proper regulations in place, careless use can result in misinformation, code breaches and employees becoming overly reliant on a tool that is not continually trained.

Compliance teams are becoming more strategic and business-integrated, helping leaders to understand how E&C programmes support business goals in an increasingly evolving AI landscape. Studies carried out in 2025 showed that people are more likely to ask AI to do things they didn’t consider ethical or that they wouldn’t do themselves¹.

With recent updates to the EU AI Act, organisations are now expected to make sure any employees using AI have the right level of AI literacy and understanding. For compliance and legal teams, that creates a challenge: how do you build awareness at scale, support ethical AI use and demonstrate the right governance is in place? If companies find themselves subject to breach, they could face hefty penalties of up to 35m or 7% of their global turnover².

Through keeping employees at the core of accurate and up-to-date content that they put their name against (the ultimate endorsement of content!), it makes authentication easier for faster and smarter search functions provided by AI. The single tap of a button means AI shortcuts can find inaccurate and outdated content far easier than ever imagined, so it’s essential that employees remain the core content creators and guardians of E&C programmes.

So how do companies address these problems? With employees wanting fast solutions from AI, panellists are encouraging companies to think creatively about how values, expectations, and guidance on AI use are communicated clearly.

Think: are your compliance and training resources relevant and easy for employees to use in practice? Without a clearer picture on where AI is really being used as a shortcut, it becomes a blind spot in compliance. We need to make sure our AI ‘colleague’ is the best version of itself. By training employees in best practice of content structure and maintenance, they can implement the governance guiderails to help AI to remain a helpful tool.

In essence, through the equation of speed, better navigation and easier search functionality, this really can result in a powerful workplace tool that is accurate and trusted – but organisations must ensure there’s always a human in the loop.

Sources: ¹ Artificial Intelligence promotes dishonesty | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
² Article 99: Penalties | EU Artificial Intelligence Act