The Hidden Cost of Compliance Inquiries
Thousands of Hours Spent on Routine Compliance Question
A recent Drata 2023 Compliance Trends Report found that 35% of organisations spend between 1,000 and 4,999 hours per year on compliance activities, 20% spend between 5,000 and 9,999 hours annually, and another 20% devote over 10,000 hours each year to compliance efforts. While this figure includes risk assessments, policy updates, audit preparation, and reporting, a significant portion of that time—often around 20%—goes toward answering employee questions about policies and regulations.
If your team logs 5,000 compliance hours per year, roughly 1,000 of those hours (over 20 weeks) are likely spent on basic inquiries that an automated system could handle.
Employees’ Lost Productivity Tallying Up to 150 Hours Annually
According to a McKinsey report, employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day—approximately 9.3 hours per week—searching for information across internal systems. A Sapio Research survey revealed that more than nine in 10 employees waste up to eight hours each week looking through documents to find data.
Suppose we estimate that one-third of this search time relates specifically to compliance or policy documents. In that case, each employee could be spending around 3 hours per week—over 150 hours per year—simply trying to locate policy guidance.
Backlogs and Delays: When Compliance Teams Can’t Keep Up
In industries like recruitment, 60% of UK healthcare recruitment firms report high non-compliance rates, accompanied by mounting compliance backlogs, which lead to slower processes and frustrated stakeholders (source). When compliance teams are overwhelmed, response times slow, and there is an increase in legal and reputational risk, employees, frustrated by delays, may make decisions without proper guidance.
The Bottom Line: Between the hours compliance teams spend answering questions and the time employees waste searching for policies, enterprises are haemorrhaging valuable time and resources. This chronic inefficiency risks regulatory penalties, lowers employee morale, and diverts your compliance team's attention from strategic, high-value work.
Enter Risky: Your AI-Powered Compliance Concierge
Risky is an AI-driven compliance assistant designed to eliminate routine back-and-forth questions, empowering your team to focus on strategic priorities. Here’s how Risky transforms the compliance experience.
Instant, Autonomous Answers
Real-Time Policy Guidance: Employees ask Risky a question—"Can I share this vendor contract with a third party?"—and instantly receive a clear, policy-backed answer. Risky cites specific internal policy clauses (and external regulations, such as the FCA Handbook or GDPR) and explains the rationale in plain language.
Time Savings for Compliance Teams: By handling up to 80% of routine inquiries, Risky relieves compliance officers from answering basic questions. Imagine reclaiming 800–1,000 hours per year to focus on audits, risk assessments, and high-stakes investigations.
Sophisticated Situation Analysis
Contextual Breakdown: Employees describe complex, multi-step scenarios, and Risky breaks them into discrete compliance questions—e.g., gift thresholds, conflict-of-interest rules, data-privacy checks. For each sub-question, Risky applies the relevant policy text and external legal references.
Dynamic Follow-Up: If an employee asks, "What if the supplier is based in a different jurisdiction?" Risky dynamically updates its analysis to include cross-border regulatory requirements.
Seamless Human-in-the-Loop Escalation
Confidence-Based Escalation: When Risky’s confidence score dips below a set threshold, because the scenario is highly unusual, ambiguous, or carries substantial risk, it flags the case for human review. Compliance officers receive a summary of Risky’s analysis, the specific policy references, and the employee’s original question, enabling them to make fast, informed decisions.
Targeted Handoff: Escalates risky routes to the most relevant compliance officer (e.g., anti-corruption, data privacy, trade compliance) based on the issue’s nature. This tailored assignment ensures the right expert handles each complex or high-risk matter.
Always Up-to-Date, Always Accurate
Real-Time Policy Ingestion: Risky syncs directly with your policy management system. As soon as a policy update is approved—whether it’s a new data-retention schedule or an amended anti-bribery clause—Risky’s index is refreshed—no more outdated PDFs floating around your shared drive.
External Regulations and Precedents: Risky ingests external legal references, such as FCA Handbook updates, GDPR amendments, and Sarbanes-Oxley changes, as well as the historical opinions of your compliance team. If the FCA issues new guidance on financial promotions, Risky integrates it automatically, ensuring employees receive advice that is compliant with the latest law.
Full Auditability and Transparency
Comprehensive Logging: Every interaction is timestamped and logged, including the employee’s question, Risky’s reasoning steps, cited policy clauses, and any escalations. This creates an immutable audit trail that streamlines internal reviews and regulatory audits, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Report Generation: If a regulator demands evidence that specific policies were applied, you can export the relevant Risky transcripts, complete with clause identifiers, links to policy documents, and compliance officer notes.
The Result: Risky functions as your first line of defence—autonomously resolving routine inquiries, preserving institutional knowledge, and escalating only the complex exceptions to human experts. Compliance teams regain bandwidth for strategic tasks, employees receive instant, accurate answers, and your organisation minimises risk in real-time.
Why Risky Outperforms Traditional Tools and BI Platforms
You may already use policy portals, static wikis, or keyword-based search tools—but none match Risky’s intelligence and adaptability. Here’s why:
Free-Form Conversation vs. Keyword Search
Traditional portals rely on employees guessing the right keywords. If a staff member searches for “gift policy”, but the relevant policy is indexed under "gifts and entertainment thresholds," they’ll struggle. Risky understands natural-language queries at a deep, semantic level, ensuring users receive the correct answer even if they phrase their questions colloquially.
Scenario Decomposition
Static FAQs cannot parse complex or multifaceted scenarios. Risky breaks down each situation into individual compliance questions (e.g., conflicts of interest, data-sharing restrictions, gift policies), applies every relevant policy, and then synthesises a combined, coherent response.
Policy Clause Citations vs. Document Links
Other tools might show a link to a PDF on a shared drive. Risky quotes the exact paragraph, highlights the specific policy number or section, and explains why that provision matters. This level of detail means employees truly understand the “why,” not just the “what.
Integrated Internal & External Knowledge
Many compliance tools focus solely on internal policies and procedures. Risky simultaneously references:
a. Internal policies: Continuously synced with your policy management system.
b. External regulations: Laws (e.g., FCA Handbook, GDPR) kept up to date.
c. Historical precedents: Prior compliance decisions from your team.
No other platform offers this three-layered, unified view.
Adaptive Learning with Human Feedback
Whenever compliance officers correct or refine Risky’s responses, the AI learns. This supervised fine-tuning ensures that Risky’s recommendations improve over time, unlike static knowledge bases, which become outdated within a matter of months.
Intuitive Chat Interface
Employees chat with Risky, 24/7, using plain English. There is no need to navigate hierarchical menus or fill out complex forms. For compliance teams, this self-service chat model means fewer tickets, less backlog, and higher employee satisfaction.
Granular Audit Logs & Reporting
Ticketing systems might log that a request was resolved, but they rarely capture every citation, date, and rationale. Risky’s logs are fully auditable, showing the question, each policy snippet cited, timestamps, confidence scores, and escalation history. This level of transparency is invaluable during regulatory or internal audits.
Bottom Line: When your team uses Risky, you’re not just adopting another policy library or ticketing system—you’re deploying a continuously learning, AI-driven compliance engine that solves routine queries autonomously and elevates only the high-stakes, ambiguous cases to human experts.
Conclusion: Replace Compliance Chaos with Calm
Regulatory complexity isn’t going away—in fact, it’s accelerating. The data is precise: compliance teams devote thousands of hours to answering routine questions, and employees waste hundreds of hours searching for policy guidance. These inefficiencies create backlogs, increase organisational risk, and divert your team's attention from value-added work.
Risky changes the game. By autonomously answering up to 80% of routine compliance questions, citing specific policy provisions, and escalating only when human judgment is required, Risky:
- Slashes thousands of hours your compliance team spends on routine inquiries.
- Recovers hundreds of hours employees lose annually searching for policies.
- Eliminates backlogs, ensuring urgent or high-risk issues are addressed immediately.
- Maintains a comprehensive audit trail, providing 24/7 transparency into every question and answer.
- Keeps policies up to date in real-time, incorporating the latest internal and external regulations into every response.
But the benefits go beyond mere numbers. Risky not only takes the heat off compliance teams but also removes the stress and frustration from your organisation, allowing employees to finally focus on their core work instead of wrestling with policy manuals. By replacing compliance chaos with calm, Risky empowers legal teams to operate at strategic speed, reduce risk, and foster a culture of compliance rather than fear.
Ready to transform your compliance function?Discover how Risky delivers instant, accurate, and auditable compliance guidance—so your team can focus on what matters most.
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