Both AI & Personal Touch Needed to Prevent Crises Like Wall Street Fines

Editor’s note: Chris Lehman, author of this article, is CEO of SafeGuard Cyber, an SaaS security platform.

Throughout the SEC’s lengthy crackdown on messaging apps, one common theme was made abundantly clear: Without proper guidance, organizations struggle to stay compliant in the face of changing rules and modern technology. As businesses increasingly rely on these platforms for convenience, they bring on serious risks and blurred lines between business and personal communications. It also raises the fact: Just because it is informal, doesn’t mean it is insignificant.

To avoid exposing your company to security risks or copious fines, businesses need to examine their communication channels and stay on top of the evolving guidelines from the SEC. In doing so, these guidelines must be clearly communicated to all employees. It is crucial that employees understand the consequences of noncompliance, as well as how to stay compliant. It isn’t enough to simply say, “don’t use this platform.”

The message from the SEC is straightforward: Adapt to compliance guidelines or face penalties. Fortunately, organizations can leverage similarly modern technologies and approaches to keep on regulators’ good side.

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Promote compliance from the top

Like anything new, change can come with resistance, but to initiate change at scale, it must come from the top. The C-suite, board of directors and leaders of the organization play a vital role in ensuring the organization stays secure and compliant. They should lead by example and display the values and rules the company aims to promote, in everything they do. If the leaders of an organization aren’t taking this seriously, how will employees?

As new guidelines and rules are established, they should be clearly communicated from the top-down. This communication must go beyond a single email; real change will occur when leadership initiates ongoing conversations and interactive training. On top of this, a clearly established compliance-based approach should constantly be re-evaluated and adapted as needed.

Automating policy enforcement with NLU and LLMs

For companies that are looking to take compliance strategies a step further, automation might be the answer. Many forward-thinking companies are already adapting to the changing guidelines by implementing compliance strategies that go beyond simple data storage. While a good first step, it’s no longer enough to simply collect data and review at the end of the year. 

Data must be thoroughly analyzed on a consistent basis to catch any compliance risks in real-time. To do so, many firms are utilizing natural language understanding (NLU) and large language models (LLMs) to effectively examine communications over time. NLU enables computers to understand sentiments expressed in a natural language used by humans, utilizing AI, while LLM is a type of AI algorithm used to understand, summarize and predict new content. These automated tools can be used proactively to help organizations identify and address compliance issues promptly.

With the increase in compliance reporting requirements and growing fines, organizations can build automated systems like NLUs or LLMs into everyday systems like email or messaging apps to automatically enforce compliance policies.  They can significantly reduce oversight costs, mitigate risks and promote business agility.