With the hype surrounding AI, many companies have sought to quickly develop or implement a tool they can launch to market. Instead, for MCO (MyComplianceOffice) AI is not just another feature added to its repertoire; it is foundational to the company’s operations, internally and externally.
MCO is a purpose-built platform that unifies key compliance functions into a single system, helping to remove blind spots and inefficiencies caused by disparate systems. Its platform is founded on four core suites: Know Your Employee, Know Your Transactions, Know Your Obligations, and Know Your Third Party, covering areas including AML/KYC compliance, communications monitoring, digital asset compliance, insider risk and more. AI is intertwined across each of its products “because compliance risk doesn’t live in silos and neither should the intelligence layer that surfaces it,” MCO’s product director John Kearney said. AI should be embedded directly within compliance products and processes, not layered on or managed as a separate capability. It must operate within the existing control framework, subject to the same oversight and accountability as the broader compliance program.
MCO director of enterprise architecture Paddy Fagan added, “Strategically, AI is how we compress time-to-value, lift the productivity of stretched compliance teams, and reduce both cost and risk for clients.” AI is a core part of MCO’s product strategy, and the team has some big plans for its continued evolution.
Real-world use cases
MCO customers are seeing clear value across a range of capabilities, with three in particular standing out.
The first is ConceptAI, which applies risk detection to employee communications surveillance. Dealing large amounts of employee communications remains an ongoing challenge for firms across the financial services sector. A recent MCO survey found that 68% of respondents monitored between 10 and 50 communication channels. The goal of ConceptAI is to effectively manage these large volumes of communications data by converting them into a prioritized, manageable set of items for human review.
The second AI use case is CARA, MCO’s digital assistantthat can answer compliance questions directly from its knowledge base and gives teams actionable guidance without the need for a support ticket.
And the final use case is trade summarization, which helps to condense the key details behind an alert. Reviewers can then quickly absorb the context and make a judgement within minutes, as opposed to sifting through the raw records.
Kearney said, “The common thread is that each one removes a specific bottleneck: review volume, help-desk load, and investigation time. The payoff for clients is the ability to reallocate scarce compliance staff to the work that actually needs human judgment within minutes, as opposed to sifting through the raw records.
These innovations enable firms to be more productive, reallocate resources to other tasks, and take the strain from help desk personnel among other benefits.
Trusting AI
Effective AI use demands trust, and this is paramount within compliance workflows. Using unchecked and unproven AI across compliance is a ticking time bomb. One error can cost a firm significant damage, through fines, reputational damage, or both. To ensure clients have peace of mind and can meet regulatory expectations, MCO has several core principles embedded throughout its AI capabilities.
The first of is human-in-the-loop as an architectural principle. All AI capabilities within MCO are initiated by users and designed to augment judgment.
They do not alter alert generation, workflow routing or decision outcomes, unless there is explicit human action. Fagan said, “As such, AI use is optional in MCO, and users are in control of how they expose data to AI at all times.”
The second principle is that AI outputs always include built-in explainability and auditability. To support defensible outcomes, all outputs created by MCO’s AI include reasoning context and links to source records, enabling compliance teams to understand how each output was derived and verify it against underlying data. Similarly, all interactions and outputs are logged in MCO’s infrastructure so clients can access a full audit trail if needed.
Finally, the AI is built upon the deterministic, rules-based compliance engine at its core of the MyComplianceOffice platform.
Kearney noted, “AI operates alongside this engine to enhance reviewer efficiency and insight. It does not override policy-driven controls, alter rule logic, or introduce opaque decision-making. MCO’s Responsible AI framework is aligned to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF1.0) and EU AI Act guidelines and is governed by a cross-functional Responsible AI Committee.”
When it comes to AI, many providers overpromise and underdeliver, eroding trust in the technology. This leaves firms struggling to distinguish between credible capabilities and marketing claims. As Fagan notes, many organizations have already been disappointed by AI vendors that failed to deliver on their promises.
MCO’s AI capabilities are not approved once and left unchecked. They are assessed for risk before development, tested for accuracy and unintended behavior before release, and continuously monitored in production with comprehensive oversight and auditability.
Compliance teams are strained, being asked to do more with less, even against the backdrop of ever-expanding regulations and a 24/7 compliance environment. As such, firms cannot rely on AI investments that do not demonstrate measurable impact, such as productivity gains, cost savings and risk mitigation.
Leading by example
MCO’s investment into AI does not exclusively rest in the MyComplianceOffice platform. The company understands the real transformative potential of the technology and embeds it throughout its own operations. Kearney explains that, “AI skilling is an essential ingredient in making MCO’s workforce successful.”
AI tools and applications are used across all its business functions to enhance productivity, including engineering, marketing, sales and field teams, and back-office functions. As with its client offerings, MCO applies clear governance to internal AI use, including defined policies around data access and approved tools.
“With AI tools embedded across MCO’s office and collaboration stack, traditional departmental silos have been reduced, enabling faster, more data-driven cross-functional collaboration.”
What is next for MCO and AI
With AI at the centre of MCO’s strategy, continued innovation in this area is a natural progression. The company is actively developing a range of new capabilities, both for internal use and client-facing solutions. Some of the highlights from that list include AI investigative assistance, deeper trade alert review capabilities, and case/deal/employee summaries.
Kearney and Fagan are confident AI’s transformation ofcompliance has only just started. They believe that one of the biggest shakeups in the coming years will be the shift from reactive compliance to proactive oversight. Instead of teams being overwhelmed by manual workloads, such as triaging alerts, assembling case context and drafting investigations, AI will free them to focus on judgment, Kearney explained.
This is where the transition from co-pilot to autonomous operator will come into play. AI will move beyond applying generic rules to learning the specific policies and procedures of the firm, enabling it to handle routine tasks more effectively—filtering out false positives and surfacing the alerts that require human attention.
While these agents will help firms improve their compliance efforts, it will actually add a new area for them to monitor. Fagan concluded, “The frontier we’re most focused on is the compliance perimeter itself expanding. As regulated firms deploy their own AI agents into trading, communications, and client-facing roles, those agents become new actors that have to be monitored, attributed, and held to the same conflicts and surveillance standards as employees.
“We think the firms that get ahead of this — treatingAI agents as super visable entities from day one — will define the next era of market integrity. Through all of it, our position doesn’t change: the deterministic engine and human accountability stay at the core. The goal isn’t to remove the compliance professional from the loop; it’s to make their judgment go further.”
MCO (MyComplianceOffice) was recently named in this year’s AIFinTech100, which identifies the companies leading AI solution providers companies helping to transform financial services. The full AIFinTech100, including profiles on each company, can be found here.
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Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
