All industries have seen a dramatic increase in the channels, apps, systems and media customers and staff use to communicate. For those in regulated industries, this presents substantial challenges as the landscape has widened beyond email and phone calls to include chat, messaging, video tools and chatbots. Regulators mandate the capture, storage and retrieval of these new forms of interactions.
Organisations are going to have to scale up their compliance infrastructure to handle the increase in communications powered by bots and prepare for a future in which artificial intelligence is routinely used to service customers. This will largely take the form of addressing simple queries and tasks, such as data entry. But as AI becomes more sophisticated, regulated actions will be tested.
Compliance is not optional for organizations in regulated markets, which will be an increasing burden as customers become more familiar with — and more appreciative of — the benefits of AI-enabled communications. Interactions will need to be tracked across all communication methods.
In the cloud market, there is often talk about the need to scale up capacity by as much as 30% year-over-year, but the sheer scale this entails is often ignored or overlooked. In addition, tomorrow’s demands are only the first step. Don’t forget that tools such as ChatGPT are rapidly developing and evolving. Predicting future growth is challenging given the uncertainty of future transformative innovations.
Firms will continue to face a heavy compliance burden caused by the ever-increasing volume and variety of data generated by broadening communication channels and the proliferation of AI data. The challenge lies in enabling interactions to be discovered even when an interaction may extend over a long period and involve multiple different forms of communication.
“The implications of the arrival of AI tools, and what they will do when they are able to be monetised properly, are enormous,” confirms Shaun Hurst, Principal Regulatory Advisor at Smarsh. “To enable infinite scaling of technology to support compliance in the AI-fuelled era will not be only from the client perspective. This has a real impact on what the future looks like and where industries, such as banking, are going in the future.”
For example, when AI tools can be used to create entire presentations, Hurst warns that a lot more content will be created as workers embrace the efficiency and ease of using AI.
Huge volumes of additional content are created, which businesses need to capture, store, process and use. From a compliance perspective, businesses must be able to easily discover, search and retrieve interactions from these lakes of new data. The difficulty is that interactions are now contained in messaging, in interactions with chatbots, in a string of emojis as well as in voice, email and SMS messages.
“We’re at a pivotal point of content creation that is going to see volumes hit the roof,” says Hurst. “What’s needed is the ability to handle scale across all content and provide the tools to maintain compliance.”
