How compliance leaders are deciding what AI can handle, what people still need to own, and what SEC and FINRA will expect them to prove

Description

The compliance function at large US financial firms is being reshaped by AI and automation. Compliance teams at RIAs, broker-dealers, and dual registrants are using automation across many parts of their day-to-day work, including communications surveillance, marketing review, employee trading checks, regulatory reporting, testing, exam preparation, and documentation. The pace is accelerating as generative AI and AI agents move into more workflows. At the same time, regulators are paying closer attention to how firms use these tools. The SEC's 2026 Examination Priorities call out firms' use of AI, automated tools, and trading algorithms, with a focus on supervision and controls. FINRA's 2026 oversight report adds new guidance on GenAI and AI agents, covering governance, validation, documentation, and human-in-the-loop review. The SEC has also intensified scrutiny of the Marketing Rule and broadened recordkeeping expectations across communication channels. This raises a question that senior compliance leaders are working through right now: what can be automated in compliance, and what cannot? Some compliance work is rules-based and repeatable, and software handles it cleanly. Other work still depends on human judgment, supervisory responsibility, and personal accountability. The roundtable will focus on which parts of compliance can safely move to AI, which parts still need human judgment, and what compliance leaders still need to own as automation takes over more reviewing, monitoring, and documentation.

Speakers

Kevin Ehrlich

Managing Director and Associate General Counsel, Asset Management Group, SIFMA

Lior Keshet

Partner, General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer, IEQ Capital

Erin Preston

SVP, Chief Compliance Officer & AMLCO, Wedbush Securities

Mark Happe

Chief Compliance Officer, MAI Capital Management

Leonard DeFranco

Editorial Lead, Hadrius

Guided Questions

Kevin Ehrlich

Across SIFMA's membership, you can see which automation investments firms are actually making. Based on where that money is going right now, which compliance task do you predict will be fully automated in five years?

Lior Keshet

As both GC and CCO, you can distinguish work that requires legal judgment from work that just requires processing, because you personally do both. Drawing that line from your own week, what's the last piece of the compliance job you'd hand to automation, and why that one?

Erin Preston

Your surveillance team disposes of alert volume at a scale where the human contribution has to be measurable, or the queue simply doesn't clear. From that vantage, when an AI surfaces a risk, what is your reviewer actually adding that the machine didn't?

Mark Happe

You came up through compliance when the entry-level work was manual, and that grunt work is arguably what trained your judgment. If automation takes that layer away, how does the next generation of CCOs learn the job, and what does a compliance career path even look like?

Leonard DeFranco

Working across many firms translating SEC and FINRA obligations into something compliance teams can actually use, you see patterns most people inside a single firm never get to compare. From that cross-firm vantage, where are teams getting the automation handoff right, and where does it quietly go wrong, where a tool gets trusted a step further than the evidence behind it can support?