Key Takeaway: Agentic AI turbocharges risk assessments by moving beyond self-reported questionnaires, interviews, and sampling to assess actual data, communications, controls, and workflows to identify vulnerabilities. These risks can then be vetted with interviews. Agentic AI serves as an early warning system for possible compliance problems, including hidden risks, regulatory violations, or reputational damage.

Today’s complex regulatory landscape requires thorough risk assessments for organizations to effectively identify vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and enable your business to achieve its objectives. Whether preparing for a merger, acquisition, or simply strengthening ongoing operations, risk assessments provide the foundation for informed decision-making and effective governance.

The Limits of Manual Review in Risk Assessments

Traditional risk assessments often rely on interviews, surveys, and manual document sampling, which only provides limited visibility. This approach, whether applied to supplier onboarding, regulatory audits, or M&A, is slow, labor-intensive, and inherently limited. Time and resource constraints also force teams to rely on small samples, which may allow for critical issues to go undetected.

The manual approach also poses difficulties in ensuring consistency. Different reviewers interpret policies differently, and human error is inevitable. The resulting insights are incomplete, and vulnerabilities might go undetected, giving stakeholders a false sense of security. Even when problems are found, tracking them across hundreds or thousands of documents is nearly impossible without automation.

Transform Compliance With Agentic AI

Agentic AI offers a transformative alternative, from ongoing compliance monitoring to post-acquisition due diligence. Instead of sampling, AI agents analyze every part of every document, from contracts terms to policy clauses, invoice line items to disbursement details, and communications between individuals with riskier responsibilities and third parties. And they don’t just flag deviations from policy; they record, categorize, and summarize them in clear, actionable language.

This equips compliance teams with a comprehensive view of any hidden exposure; you know exactly where the risks lie and what to do about them.

The Role of Risk Assessments in Post-Acquisition Success

One of the most consequential moments for a risk assessment is during M&A, where post-acquisition due diligence becomes critical. While teams will have completed pre-merger planning during the HSR process to meet regulatory compliance and transparency standards before the deal closes, once the acquisition is complete, due diligence is essential to validate compliance controls, uncover hidden risks, and support seamless integration. 

According to one Reuters report, global M&A activity is up 10% thus far in 2025. Chief Compliance Officers (CCOs) are facing a challenge in any acquisition: efficient post-deal due diligence and effective integration.

Legal and compliance teams rely on interviews, surveys, and manual document sampling to assess compliance exposure and control effectiveness of the newly acquired entity. This limits the review to a subset of the acquired entity’s policies, contracts, invoices, and due diligence files, and requires reading between the lines of interview and questionnaire responses. Manual post-acquisition due diligence is slow, labor-intensive, and inherently limited. 

AI capabilities provide the opportunity to significantly improve that process and reduce risk for legal and compliance teams evaluating newly acquired entities. This allows more time to focus on integration planning and engage with new business colleagues.

Real-World Impact

Imagine you are acquiring a company with hundreds of third parties that sell equipment and service contracts to municipalities. In addition to interviews and a survey, the sampling of due diligence files, contracts, invoices, and Travel and Entertainment (T&E) records for manual review could take months. Due to complexity, it is doubtful that the acquiring entity would include a sample of communications data in its assessment. 

With AI agents, once the relevant data is securely stored, the process, including analyzing countless data points, flagging non-standard activity, and comprehensively assessing compliance alignment, takes only days. Additionally, AI cross-references information at scale, allowing for the maintenance of a comprehensive audit trail. Each flagged issue is traced back to the exact source document and context, lending confidence in AI’s findings.

All of this gives a clearer and more reliable picture of the acquired company’s risk profile. Utilizing AI enables you to shift the conversation from scenario-based interviews to conversations about specific events, and the results may negate the need to conduct a survey. The time saved enables you to engage the newly acquired entity’s employees and develop an integration roadmap.

Gain Speed and Depth Without Compromise

One of the most powerful advantages of deploying AI agents for post-acquisition due diligence is speed. What used to take weeks is now done in hours.

AI doesn’t get tired or distracted like human reviewers. It processes thousands of documents with precision and consistency, surfacing insights that would be impossible to catch manually. Exhaustive testing with the right tools ensures that nothing slips through the cracks. While humans could theoretically achieve the same result, doing so would require enormous time and resources while still risking variability in interpretation. The right technology delivers precision, consistency, and scale that manual processes simply cannot match.

This speed also enables deeper analysis. AI identifies patterns across documents, tracks recurring issues, and even suggests areas for policy improvement. Agents don’t just uncover problems; they help you understand them. Keep in mind, verification is critical and compliance professionals will need to test AI results to ensure that they are trustworthy.

Beyond Initial Review: Continuous Monitoring

The benefits of AI extend beyond your initial risk assessment. Once the data lake is established, AI agents run continuously or at scheduled intervals. They monitor new deviations, summarize and escalate issues in real-time, and allow compliance teams to stay ahead of potential issues.

This transforms post-acquisition due diligence into an ongoing compliance strategy. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring, compliance teams are now proactively surfacing potential concerns and addressing, detecting, and managing them. In turn, they reduce exposure and empower strong governance. Many of the identified examples can be incorporated into training and communications, increasing relevance to employees.

A Strategic Advantage for Chief Compliance Officers

For CCOs, agentic AI offers more than operational efficiency. By processing more data to surface hidden risks and creating a secure data repository to enable continuous monitoring, AI empowers compliance leaders to make informed decisions, provide transparency to stakeholders, and build fortified compliance frameworks.

AI agents enable compliance teams to conduct deeper reviews, faster assessments, and proactive risk mitigation. This is not an incremental improvement. It is a fundamental shift in how compliance is executed.

Learn more about Epiq Compliance Advisory and Technology.


Jerry Kral, Compliance Advisory Leader
At Epiq, Jerry Kral leads the Compliance Advisory and Technology Practice, based out of the Epiq Chicago office.

For over 25 years, Jerry has served as a trusted advisor to General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officers, helping establish, enhance, and optimize risk-based compliance programs and infrastructure.