Smart Compliance: Why AI, and ChatGPT Specifically, Is Essential for Standards Compliance

The European Union is introducing a wave of new regulations that will profoundly affect how businesses operate. From AI Act and Data Act to CSRD, NIS2, and the Cyber Resilience Act, companies across sectors are facing increasing demands to ensure compliance with complex and evolving standards. While these regulations aim to create a safer, more transparent, and sustainable future, they also introduce a new layer of bureaucracy that threatens to overwhelm businesses.

In this landscape, tools like ChatGPT are emerging as game-changers, enabling companies to understand the regulatory requirements. Here's how AI could turn this game-over to smart compliance.

The EU’s Regulatory Tsunami

The EU has positioned itself as a global leader in setting the regulatory framework for emerging technologies and sustainable business practices. Some, but not all, key regulations are:

• AI Act: Establishing rules for the ethical use of artificial intelligence.
• Data Act: Governing data sharing and access across industries.
• CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive): Requiring companies to report detailed sustainability metrics.
• NIS2 Directive: Strengthening cybersecurity across the EU.
• Cyber Resilience Act: Setting stricter standards for the security of digital products.

While these initiatives aim to protect consumers, foster trust, and ensure ethical practices, they also place a heavy burden on companies. Understanding, interpreting, and implementing these regulations requires significant resources—resources that could otherwise fuel innovation.

The Challenge: Bureaucracy Overload

For many businesses, navigating the sheer complexity of EU regulations feels like an insurmountable task:

• Thousands of pages of legal text need to be analyzed and understood.
• Requirements often overlap or conflict with one another.
• Compliance involves not just understanding the regulations but integrating them into day-to-day processes, from product development to corporate reporting.

Without efficient tools, compliance could drain time, talent, and energy—turning it into a costly distraction rather than a strategic advantage.

How AI Transforms Standards Compliance

AI tools like ChatGPT offer a lifeline to businesses by simplifying the compliance process. Here's how:

1. Breaking Down Complexity

ChatGPT can analyze and summarize dense legal and technical documents, transforming complex regulatory text into clear, actionable insights.?

2. Identifying Relevance

Not every part of a regulation applies to every business. ChatGPT can help businesses identify the sections of a standard that are directly applicable, saving time and resources by narrowing the focus to what truly matters.

3. Providing Practical Guidance

By answering questions in natural language, ChatGPT can guide businesses on how to implement specific requirements. For example:

"How do we document accessibility for our mobile app?"

"What cybersecurity measures are required under NIS2?"

4. Enhancing Collaboration

AI can act as a bridge between legal, technical, and operational teams by ensuring that everyone is working from the same understanding of the regulations.

Why ChatGPT Is a Sweet Spot for Compliance

Among AI tools, ChatGPT and other LLMs stand out as particularly well-suited for compliance tasks because they combine two critical capabilities:

Deep Knowledge of Standards: ChatGPT has been trained on a vast range of directives, regulations, and standards, such as ISO27001, EN 301 549, NIS2, and CSRD. Additionally, it benefits from extensive material written by consultants and experts, which is publicly available online. This makes it inherently familiar with their structure, language, and requirements, as well as best practices for compliance.?

Company-Specific Contextualization: ChatGPT allows businesses to provide detailed information about their specific context—industry, structure, operations, and challenges. By combining this context with its regulatory knowledge, ChatGPT can pinpoint exactly which parts of a standard are relevant and suggest tailored solutions.

This dual capability enables ChatGPT to simplify standard documents that are hundreds of pages long into one or two pages of actionable insights specific to a company’s needs. It’s this targeted approach that transforms compliance from a daunting task into an efficient process.

Smart Compliance in Action: EN 301 549

Take the case of EN 301 549, the EU standard for digital accessibility. For us, as a SaaS vendor, this regulation outlines specific requirements to ensure our apps are well accessible to users. But we did not have any prior expertise on this 407-page standard, its language, terms, or structure.?

Using ChatGPT, we did the following:

• Explained what kind of company we are, using keywords like SaaS, Sotender, and PWA to set the context clearly.
• Allowed ChatGPT to identify which parts of the standard were applicable to our apps.
• Directed it to simplify technical language into actionable steps tailored for us.
• Used it to document requirements and compliance in a structured format (e.g., a table) that was clear and easy to understand. (The accessibility standard itself is not very accessible.)
• Reduced 160 verification steps to fewer than 30.

All this in just a couple of hours, without prior knowledge of the standard, its language, or any compliance experience it required. What would have taken days of manual effort was streamlined into a few hours, allowing the team to focus on implementing the required changes rather than deciphering the standard.

The Future of Compliance Is AI-Driven

As the EU introduces increasingly complex regulations, businesses need a smarter way to stay compliant. AI tools like ChatGPT enable smart compliance by:

• Saving time and consultant costs: Reducing the manual effort required to understand and implement standards.
• Reducing risk: Ensuring no critical requirement is overlooked.
• Unlocking opportunity: Allowing businesses to focus on innovation while maintaining regulatory excellence.
• Lowering stress level: the language on these documents drives you crazy, let ChatGPT interpret that to you in your company's context.

Key Takeaways for Businesses

1. Start Small: Begin with a specific standard or regulation to learn the new process.
2. Integrate AI Early: Make AI a core part of your compliance process to stay ahead as regulations evolve. ChatGPT excels in long, detailed discussions, providing better context and more precise answers as the conversation progresses.
3. Combine Human Expertise with AI Efficiency: AI accelerates the process, but human insight remains crucial for context and implementation. Only you can explain what normal life in your company looks like. The better ChatGPT understands your context, the better its answers will be.?

Conclusion: A Smarter Path to Regulatory Success

By leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT, companies can turn the complexity of EU regulations into a competitive advantage, building trust, ensuring ethical practices, and freeing up resources to focus on what truly matters: growth and innovation.

Final note: The EU could streamline compliance by providing directives and standards as pre-built AI tools or bots, making it easier for businesses to navigate regulatory requirements efficiently.