Striking a balance between enterprise AI deployments with regulatory compliance is a significant challenge for most organizations, often influenced by the following factors:

Lack of visibility in the organization’s AI use and their associated risks.
Uncertainty about which AI-specific regulations and adjacent laws apply to current AI deployments.
Limited understanding of how to align responsible AI principles with business goals and operations.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Cut through the regulatory noise.

Simplify AI compliance by adopting a risk-based approach that aligns with global standards, enabling you to prioritize critical activities and manage complexity effectively.

Impact and Result

Aligning with global standards reduces regulatory complexity, making it easier to navigate complex requirements.
A risk-based approach enables risk identification and pre-emptive mitigation.
By prioritizing critical activities based on risk, resources can be allocated with increased efficacy.
Enable leadership to make informed decisions about where to invest in compliance measures.

Develop an AI Compliance Strategy Research & Tools

1. Develop an AI Compliance Strategy – Establish a structured approach to align AI systems with regulatory requirements and organizational goals.

Provide your team with a step-by-step framework to align AI systems and applications with regulatory requirements and business objectives, ensuring a structured and actionable compliance strategy.

2. AI Portfolio and Compliance Assessment Tool – Discover and document AI investments to assess compliance status, identify gaps, and prioritize actions for effective governance.

Empower your organization to inventory AI systems and applications, evaluate compliance attributes, and act on key risks to strengthen governance and ensure adherence to regulations.

3. AI Compliance Strategy & Roadmap Template – Clearly articulate the compliance strategy, outcomes, and roadmap to stakeholders, ensuring alignment and buy-in.

Effectively present the strategy by outlining key findings, actionable insights, and a clear roadmap, fostering stakeholder understanding and support for sustained implementation.

Develop an AI Compliance Strategy

Provide actionable steps for your teams to align with global AI standards.

Analyst Perspective

Take a strategic approach to comply with AI regulations.

AI technologies are rapidly advancing, and complex regulations are emerging constantly to keep pace. Different jurisdictions have their own AI regulations, leading to a patchwork of rules that organizations must navigate. While there is a growing need for AI solutions to address various business challenges, organizations must be cognizant of the obligations they may be subject to.

Business leaders have a responsibility to understand which local, national, and industry-specific regulations and standards for AI apply to their organization. They must identify AI systems, applications, and related vendors used within the organization.

Organizations that are rolling out AI capabilities are operating in an environment that combines enormous potential with growing regulatory and ethical complexity. Aiming to leverage significant opportunities for innovation and efficiency – while addressing challenges related to compliance, transparency, and trust – is crucial.

The Info-Tech methodology will enable businesses to anticipate and address regulatory requirements proactively by adopting a strategic approach and the right tools to navigate this landscape successfully.

Safayat Moahamad

Safayat Moahamad
Research Director
Security and Privacy
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

AI regulations are emerging and evolving rapidly.
AI applications involve the processing of large amounts of data, raising concerns about data privacy and security.
AI can have significant ethical implications, such as bias, discrimination, and job displacement.
Implementing an AI compliance strategy with prioritized tasks and initiatives.

Common Obstacles

There may be limited visibility into AI systems used by the organization and their associated risks.
Compliance requirements may need to adapt to progressive business needs and technology.
There may be ambiguity about who is responsible for AI compliance activities within the organization.
Employees may resist the changes to processes that are necessary to achieve compliance.

Info-Tech's Approach

Identify the contextual use of AI.
Maintain an AI portfolio to enable visibility on AI systems and their associated risk levels.
Use a responsible AI principles-driven compliance framework mapped to globally recognized AI standards and controls.
Conduct an assessment in support of creating a roadmap to the desired state of compliance.

Info-Tech Insight

Cut through the regulatory noise. Simplify AI compliance by adopting a risk-based approach that aligns with global standards, enabling you to prioritize critical activities and manage complexity effectively.

Your challenge

This research is designed to help organizations who are facing these challenges:

Keeping up with the rapid pace of law and policy development.
Limited visibility and control over AI deployments.
Lack of actionable guidance on responsible AI.
Compliance concerns stemming from absence of AI governance functions.
Build the roadmap to implement an AI compliance strategy.
Establishing what metrics are in place to measure the progress of the compliance strategy.

"We take a risk-based approach to finding out what types of AI are in consideration to identify thresholds of high-risk systems and minimize resource allocation to low-risk activities." – Sarah Nasrullah, Legal Counsel, Privacy and AI, Bell Canada

42%	42% of respondents identified keeping up with the rapid pace of law as a major challenge.
65%	65% of organizations without AI governance functions lack confidence in their compliance posture.*
80%	80% of organizations have declarations for responsible AI without actionable steps.
30%	Only 30% of respondents reported having a central inventory.**

* Source: Professionalizing Organizational AI Governance Report, IAPP, 2023
**Source: Privacy AI Governance Report, IAPP, 2023

Common obstacles

These barriers are challenging for many organizations:

Establishing responsible AI guiding principles to guide AI investments and deployments.
Absence of a controls library for AI deployments.
Skills shortage for responsible AI management.
Insufficient communication and knowledge management for AI compliance.
Fragmented accountability in third-party AI procurement and usage.
Advancing the AI maturity of the organization to meet requirements of data governance and AI compliance, as well as human-based requirements such as fairness, transparency, and accountability.

"Bell has implemented a Responsible AI policy as part of AI governance. This includes the design and operation of AI registration, risk assessment, and user education." – Shuo Wang, GenAI PMO, RAI Office, Bell Canada

57%	57% Of respondents face an absence of control over AI deployment within their organizations.
20%	Only 20% of organizations addressed the challenge of having skills for responsible management of AI.
20%	Only 20% of organizations addressed proactive knowledge management to ensure knowledge transfer.
70%	70% of organizations rely on third-party AI, so the responsibility for ensuring AI systems are safe may be spread across multiple roles.

Source: IAPP, 2024

Insight summary

Cut through the regulatory noise.

Simplify AI compliance by adopting a risk-based approach that aligns with global standards, enabling you to prioritize critical activities and manage complexity effectively.

Intended purposes and visibility are critical.

Start by documenting and understanding the AI systems in your organization.
It is not just a checkbox but the compass that guides AI systems toward trustworthiness, accountability, and regulatory alignment.

Manage complexity with structure and avoid duplicating effort.

Tackle evolving and overlapping regulations by aligning cross-functional leadership, engaging experts, and implementing a structured compliance framework to prioritize and address obligations effectively.
If your organization's obligations mirror or are less stringent than those already mapped, leverage the existing framework to save time and focus on the implementation of controls.

Emphasize self-assessments.

Foster continued support by engaging relevant stakeholders in periodic control evaluations. Ensure stakeholders agree on the risk level compliance should be assessed against. Be prepared to manage any resulting exceptions.

Prioritize effectively.

Transform your list of actions and initiatives into a roadmap for measurable progress, ensuring resources are focused on driving value and aligning strategic goals and objectives.

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits

Business Benefits

Identify and address technical risks in AI systems, ensuring secure and reliable operation.
Reduce the IT team's workload by providing a framework and tool to simplify compliance with AI regulations and standards.
Obtain a unified view of AI applications and compliance metrics, improving oversight and control.
A structured approach adaptable to IT environments of varying complexity, enabling consistent compliance as AI systems evolve.

Meet legal and ethical standards, avoiding fines, legal risks, and reputational damage.
Support leadership with actionable insights and metrics, ensuring alignment between AI initiatives and business goals.
Prioritize compliance efforts based on risk, optimizing resource allocation, and reducing unnecessary expenditures.
Demonstrate a commitment to responsible AI, fostering trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders.

The Key Deliverable

AI Compliance Strategy & Roadmap Template

Leverage this template to help you finalize a presentation on your:

AI portfolio
Compliance concerns
Proposed compliance roadmap

Leverage these supporting tools to inform the key deliverable:

AI Portfolio and Compliance Assessment Tool

An image of the AI Portfolio and Compliance Assessment Tool

The portfolio tool will help you obtain visibility into current and planned AI deployments and track their overall risk levels.

The results will inform the outputs in your AI Compliance Strategy & Roadmap Template.

An image of the AI Compliance Strategy & Roadmap Template.

The framework-based self-assessment tool will allow you to conduct a structured review of your current and target compliance state. The results will inform your compliance journey and roadmap.

Info-Tech's approach will accelerate your progress

Consider tracking the following metrics to measure the value of your AI compliance strategy.

Metric	Expected Improvement
Number of controls required for compliance obligations	Use of control framework may reduce the number of controls by 70-90%.
Control implementation costs	Use of a risk-based approach may reduce implementation costs by an average of 25% per control.
Audit costs	Self-assessment and evidence preparation may reduce audit costs by up to 50%.
Compliance management efforts	Effort required for overall compliance management may be reduced by 50% or more.

Cost saved: 50%-60%

Benefits are iterative

Over time, experience incremental value from your initial AI compliance strategy. Through continual updates your strategy will evolve, but with less associated effort, time, and costs.

Develop an AI Compliance Strategy visualization

Provide actionable steps for your teams to align with global AI standards.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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