The ROI of Compliance Mappings – How AI transforms each step in the process

Introducing Our Author

Shwetha Shantharam, AVP and Product Head at 4CRisk.ai, with more than 20 years’ experience in software, and has specialized in AI-powered products for regulatory, compliance and risk teams. She joins us in this blog series on Compliance Maps, to review how AI-powered products, agents and co-pilots transform and provide a powerful ROI at each step in the process.

The Overall ROI of deploying AI-powered Compliance Map

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a transformative force for Compliance mapping efforts. But what’s the real business value and the return on investment (ROI)?

In this blog, we build on Compliance Map program steps and apply ROI math to estimate how AI delivers business value, with a realistic example. We make some assumptions about the organization that we carry through each step of the business process supporting this organization.

With 4CRisk’s Compliance Map Product – You can expect at least a 300% improvement with an ROI estimated at less than a year.

This translates to $164,533 annually, assuming a $500 fully loaded daily cost ($120,000 average annual) per staff member. Critically - Your staff can be freed from mundane manual tasks to provide higher value analysis and decision-making in your organization!

Our Representative Example

Freed Days: Using the assumptions outlined below, we can expect an annual efficiency savings of ~325 staff days freed of the 391 days typically spent on these tasks, without 4CRisk’s AI-powered products.

Here’s how we arrived at the Annual Savings and ROI.  

Let’s assume this organization has:

• Obligations under 50 distinct regulations, rules, and laws, including 12 standards, such as NIST CSF, PCI DSS and FISMA rules.
• Each has an average of 5 sections, resulting in a global rulebook with 250 requirements.
• 5 rulebooks will need to be created and reviewed with different business units.
• The compliance team manages a compliance framework 900 artifacts – comprised of 250+ policies, standards and procedures, and 400 control objectives that must be related (mapped) to Rulebook.
• About 10% of the rulebook will change annually, meaning that about 115 compliance framework artifacts will need to be mapped and reviewed for gaps.

Process 1: Create a Compliance Map – 4CRisk.ai is about 50 X faster than manual methods

The objective of this step is to review policies, contracts, and other compliance documents to be analyzed parsed for traceability and alignment with your rulebooks. Specifically, your team will create a Compliance Map by matching rulebook(s) (regulations, rules, and laws), at the section level, to applicable governance artifacts (policies, procedures, contracts and controls) in your organization.  

Since 4CRisk’s LLM can review a massive data set of thousands of regulatory documents, from various feeds, parse them into sections, and tag them for applicability, 4CRisk’s AI-powered Compliance Map can deliver up to 50X faster results! How?

4CRisk’s Compliance Map product can: ‍

• Leverage Sankey Diagrams to capture & summarize weaknesses and duplicates in the compliance framework with visually engaging diagrams.
• Provide a summary from the Sankey diagram, in exportable (PDF and Excel), tabular format showing strong, partial, minimal, or unmapped compliance artifacts

VALUE: It takes an SME an average of 2 days to map gaps of the rulebook to each of the 115 artifacts that need to be reviewed, using manual methods. 4CRisk’s Compliance Map product, you can see a substantial improvement - about 50x more effective with an LLM. That’s 5 days down from ~230 days!

Process 2: Human in the Loop Review   - 4CRisk.ai is about 3 X faster than manual methods

The objective of this step is to see traceability and coverage of requirements to corresponding elements i.e. Regs to Policies to Controls. Your team will review and edit your compliance mappings based on jurisdiction, nature and scope as well as systems, processes, products, contracts, policies, procedures and controls.

4CRisk’s Compliance Map product can:

• Search and filter the Sankey diagram to show only coverage based on certain rules using the rules filter
• Answer queries quickly with Ask ARIA (Conversational AI) and provide 3-5 recommended answers and their sources to help in action planning
• Provide a Confidence rating for accuracy of mapping against regulatory changes
• Provide a heads-up to impacted business units and the documents they support

VALUE: It takes an SME an average of 1 day to review for each of the 115 artifacts, using manual methods.  4CRisk’s Compliance Map product, you can see a big improvement - about 3x more effective – and it takes only 23 days.

Process 3: Change Plan and Action Items - 4CRisk.ai is about 3 X faster than manual methods

The objective of this step is to prioritize and pinpoint actions to close gaps in compliance artifacts and governance documents.  Your team will raise issues and action plans to assign actions to the right SMEs to close gaps in compliance revealed in the Compliance Map.

4CRisk’s Compliance Map product generates language recommendations to close gaps, and auto-tracks remedial actions. In addition, 4CRisk can integrate with GRC systems and allow auto-population of GRC libraries.

VALUE: It takes an SME an average of 2 days to complete an action plan with the correct sub-steps and assign to SMEs to close gaps. This often involves an update all related systems and spreadsheets, using manual methods.  Let’s assume 23 action plans, which translates into 46 days. With 4CRisk’s Compliance Map product, you can see a big improvement - about 2x more effective – and it takes only 23 days.

If you also have 4CRisk’s Regulatory Research product, you can power up Compliance Maps with robust AI-generated rulebook(s) and business obligations.

If you also 4CRisk Regulatory Change Management product, Compliance Maps can enhance your Regulatory Change Management process to identify new gaps in rules, regulations and laws and compliance artifacts.

Qualitative Benefits

In addition to the hard benefits above, organizations can

Reduce the of risk of non-compliance

• Create and manage a full spectrum of global regulations aligned with business and control objectives
• Assess effectiveness of internal controls and compliance practices against industry benchmarks
• Eliminate human errors and biases when connecting rules to internal control framework

Improve effectiveness of the design of the internal control environment

• Reduce manual effort and cost in discovery, creation, maintenance, and traceability of data relationships
• Drive transparency and linkage of information to improve insight and ensure strategic business alignment
• Build requirement inventories that are strategic and give business competitive advantage

Improve agility with faster response time to changes in your obligations

• Quickly identify coverage gaps of regulatory requirements within the control framework
• Understand the context of changes to quickly measure associated risks and business impact

Incorporate AI driven insights into regulatory requirements mapping with internal control framework

Would you like a walkthrough of our Compliance Map Value Calculator to see what you of 4Crisk products can do for your organization?  Contactus@4crisk.ai or click here to register for the ROI Calculator demo.

Check out these related blogs and resources  

• https://www.4crisk.ai/post/nist-csf-2-0-has-been-released-do-you-know-what-your-organizations-gaps-are ‍
• https://www.4crisk.ai/post/risky-business-navigate-2025-with-trustworthy-gen-ai-ai-powered-cybersecurity-and-regulatory-intelligence ‍
• https://www.4crisk.ai/whitepapers/roi-and-business-case-for-ai