How AI Agents Help Financial Crime Compliance Teams Re-Gain Focus 

“AI” and “Focus” are two terms that rarely have a strong correlation in the countless number of articles and marketing pitches hyping AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI today. With big tech companies dominating the airwaves of “AI speak,” one can easily get drawn into a world of esoteric spin and partially painted realities of autonomous ‘wonderbots’ devising dreamy ways to solve problems and magically perform them.

But flying below all the hype of the AI stratosphere are AI Agents for financial crime compliance. WorkFusion’s AI Agents are practical and deliver high-volume, automated, necessary functionality targeted to specific tasks in FinCrime compliance. Their main purpose? To perform the repetitive and mundane tasks that compliance team members (A) detest doing all day long, (B) find to be mind-numbing with very little value add, and (C) are error-prone and lack consistency.

Beyond their ability to relieve human counterparts of their repetitive drudge work, AI Agents help each individual compliance team to focus on its most critical area(s) where leaders seeks to mitigate operational risk. The irony of this benefit of adopting an AI Agent is that it has little to do with technology advancement and much to do with a compliance team’s operational strategy. Let me explain.

When a compliance team’s leadership decides that it is time to gain more operational efficiency by using an AI Agent, they typically already know that the technology can intelligently automate a targeted end-to-end process, such as transaction monitoring alert review in AML or adverse media search and review for KYC (know your customer). But as they consider how to actually automate their process, they often (and suddenly) realize that they have the flexibility to instruct the AI Agent regarding which parts of the process to automate.

As the experts in AI Agent technology, this is where we typically step back and watch a common scenario play out. Compliance team leaders start to look at their process in ways they never had before and find themselves asking new questions about long-standardized processes: “Why do we do it this way?”; “If we automate this step, are we causing problems elsewhere?”; “Where do we have risk when we fall behind?”; “Can we eliminate that step completely?”; “Why do we even do that step?”; “Are we actually alerting on the right criteria?”; “Has our customer base changed so that we need to do it differently?”; “How does this change improve our ultimate goal of filing more accurate SARs?”; and so on.

These are all great questions. Once team leaders start to think this way, it becomes far easier for us to suggest the following: Consider tuning your process in a way that identifies risk and supports your ultimate goals. Having taken that step, automating the process with an AI Agent is easy. After all, the end goal is not really to just speed up everything. The end goal is to reduce or remove the risk of failing to identify potential financial crimes in the compliance operation and reporting your activities in a compliant manner.

We have been quite pleased over the last three years to witness how our AI Agents have become somewhat of a forcing function behind the re-focusing of FinCrime compliance processes.

By focusing on end goals and where the risk is to achieve them, compliance team leaders can prepare far better for evaluating tools and technologies like AI Agents. In the end, you will run a much more meaningful POC (proof of concept) with a new technology when you know what / where you want to improve and why.

If you would like more information about what’s possible in re-focusing your financial crime compliance processes with WorkFusion’s AI Agents, please schedule a demo.