This article is the first of a two-part series
When it comes to building a world-class compliance program, nearly every organization faces a familiar paradox. Advances in data, analytics and cloud platforms are coming at breakneck speed. Yet even as these tools become more accessible and powerful, compliance teams are being left out in the cold with rudimentary spreadsheets, limited budgets and reactionary workflows.
Here’s the reality most compliance leaders don’t hear enough: technology only works if people use it. Too often, organizations equate investment with progress, only to find dashboards and alerts gathering dust because the human element wasn’t factored in. In fact, the biggest difference between tech-enabled compliance leaders and those left scrambling isn’t budget, infrastructure or the next “game changer” AI tool. It’s culture, mindset and incentives. Empirical work across organizational contexts consistently shows that adoption hinges on behavioral and cultural factors – and a 2025 study by Future Business Journal highlights exactly those insights. Put simply, attitudes, norms and managerial support are as decisive as the technology itself.
The fantasy of tech-first solutions
Many firms, motivated by headlines and the allure of automation, invest heavily in new SaaS platforms and analytics packages. The intent is sound: to enable growth, improve oversight, and be ready to act when the next investigative or regulatory crisis erupts. But in practice, this approach too often falls flat. According to a 2023 benchmarking survey by KPMG, 45% of companies have either no analytics program or only a rudimentary one. And this is in an era when the average enterprise manages data measured not in gigabytes or terabytes, but petabytes. So, why aren’t compliance teams further along?
The real barrier isn’t budget
The role of compliance is uniquely tricky – unlike IT or finance, compliance rarely owns its data. Employee activity logs, transactional trends and risk signals typically reside in business units, HR systems, cloud platforms or third-party applications. So, compliance teams are left to stitch together insights from disparate systems. This diffusion of ownership makes it hard to get timely, reliable data for risk prioritization or regulatory reporting. It also fuels persistent gaps between intention and execution. Recent industry research highlights this challenge: in PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025, 63% of organizations cite the complexity and disaggregation of data across the enterprise as a top barrier to effective compliance activities, with many compliance functions struggling to access, integrate and trust the data they need to manage risk confidently. It’s clear that compliance functions with real influence over business decisions – including involvement in product development and strategic initiatives – are far more likely to be viewed as trusted partners, instead of sidelined regulators.
In addition, compliance professionals are typically drawn from legal and accounting backgrounds. These professions are steeped in a tradition of caution and reaction. It’s a mindset that serves audit and litigation well but can act as a barrier when the aim is to build proactive, data-driven programs that require risk-taking, experimentation and cross-departmental influence.
Motivation is key
When compliance fails to make a compelling case for owning its data, shaping workflows and partnering in technology design, it is often pushed to the margins and treated as a cost center rather than a value driver. In truth, the real constraint is rarely budget – it’s motivation. It’s crucial that decision-makers make sure purpose, incentives and influence are aligned to give compliance a meaningful seat at the table. Because without that backing, teams will struggle to access data, influence design and embed effective risk controls.
Mindset and ownership – the real differentiators
Technology gives you reach, but culture gives you traction. However, without genuine cultural buy-in, compliance tech will always be seen as somebody else’s job to implement or ignore. Companies that consistently succeed don’t just pilot new tools — they co-design solutions with their end users, embed leadership modeling of real usage, and align incentives so that middle managers are rewarded for championing new approaches. Crucially, successful adoption ties the “why” behind each tool back to what matters for users in their roles, not just what matters for audit reports or regulatory filings.
Peer-reviewed research on digital technology adoption such as Discover Global Society’s 2024 study underscores this dynamic. Again, the authors reveal that culture, leadership support and internal motivations are among the most significant determinants of whether people embrace and use new systems in practice – often outweighing purely technical considerations.
How culture creates a block
A range of organizational factors tend to block tech adoption. For example, leadership gaps can often arise when tech adoption is seen as “the compliance team’s problem” or when leaders simply announce a new tool without integrating it into their own routines – and engagement plummets. Employees are also more likely to quietly sidestep new platforms if they see compliance as punitive or peripheral to their day-to-day work. Compliance priorities (defensibility, reporting, audit trails) are rarely front-of-mind for business units fixated on growth or market share. And training is often an afterthought, offered late, infrequently or as a one-off check-the-box exercise, making sustainable adoption almost impossible. Without genuine process redesign, new tools simply automate old inefficiencies or reinforce silos.
The pitfalls of tech first, culture last
Investing in the latest analytics dashboard or AI-driven risk-scoring engine won’t move the needle if users fear or resent the new process – or if nobody has challenged whether the process matches real business risks. Compliance professionals are hearing more calls to “just use AI” or “build an analytics program” and yet when pressed, most teams don’t know where their critical datasets live, lack governance for process changes, or simply do not have buy-in through the organization.
Consider a company that invested in an AI-powered monitoring platform for employee communications. The tool was technically advanced, but deployment was led solely by IT with minimal training for end users and management. Employees saw the system as punitive and opaque, avoided it when possible and found workarounds that kept compliance in the dark. The result: the company had a platform with all the technical promise in the world and none of the real-world impact.
Culture over capital
Where leaders see compliance only as risk insurance or a bottleneck, investment flows elsewhere. When they understand how better workflows and actionable analytics can enable growth, inform decisions and solve business problems faster, the conversation changes. Ultimately, the teams that extract value from compliance tech are those who’ve done the work to align incentives, connect the why to the how, and design processes that put people and not just policy center stage. Because history shows that you can buy the best platform on the market but if your people don’t trust it, use it or understand how it helps them, it’s wasted.
Part 2 of this blog series will dive deeper into how to build a culture of real adoption. We’ll explore leadership modelling, behavioral design, co-creation and a range of practical strategies designed to transform compliance tech from shelfware into streamlined business enabler.