What Our Customers Asked For – And What We Have Delivered

This blog was originally posted on 25th June, 2026. Further developments may have occurred after publication. To keep up-to-date with the latest compliance news, sign up to our newsletter.

AUTHORED BY DANNY CASSIDY, SVP OF SALES, ADHERENT

Over the course of my career I have partnered with hundreds of corporate leaders on product compliance and regulatory programs. I have sat in a lot of rooms, heard a lot of problems described in a lot of different ways, and worked through solutions that ranged from genuinely transformative to deeply frustrating. Across all of that, certain themes come up so consistently that they start to feel like the defining shape of the challenge.

With the launch of Adherent, we have finally built the answer to those themes. I want to tell you what they are – and what we have done about them.

For the vision behind this launch, read our CEO Rahul Sachdev’s piece: A New Chapter: Compliance & Risks is Now Adherent.

What Compliance Leaders Have Been Telling Us

The conversation I have had more times than I can count goes something like this:

A compliance leader – usually experienced, usually under-resourced relative to what they are being asked to deliver – describes a process that is holding their organization back. Too much time spent on manual research. Too many spreadsheets. Regulations that change without warning and create downstream panic. And the constant, grinding difficulty of not just staying compliant, but being able to prove it – quickly, credibly, to whoever is asking.

The problem isn’t that they don’t know what good looks like. Most compliance leaders I speak to have a very clear picture of where they want to be: requirements identified early, evidence built continuously, decisions that can be defended without a weeks-long scramble.

The problem is that the tools available to them have not been capable of getting them there. Not reliably. Not at the scale they operate at. And not with the accuracy that high-stakes decisions demand.

Why Generic AI Has Not Solved It

The emergence of AI tools in the compliance space has raised expectations – and, in many cases, quickly lowered them again. The problem with applying a general-purpose language model to compliance decisions is the same problem that has dogged every previous wave of compliance technology: applicability.

Which regulations actually apply to this product, in this market, for this company? A model trained on internet data and asked to answer that question may generate a plausible-sounding response (but not consistently). It most certainly will not generate a defensible one.

In compliance, that distinction is everything. A decision is not just right or wrong – it needs to be traceable, evidenced, and defensible to regulators, auditors, and procurement teams who will ask not just what the answer was, but how you arrived at it. Generic AI cannot provide that. Adherent can – because it was built from first principles to solve exactly that problem, on a foundation of almost twenty-five years of human regulatory expertise that no model can replicate from training data alone.

What Adherent Delivers in Practice

The question I am asked most often by prospects is some version of: what does this actually look like for my team? Here is the honest answer.

Assessing over 1,000 regulations for a new product entering a single market – a task that would previously require four to six months of manual work – can now be completed in under ten minutes. Every outcome is anchored to specific regulatory text, validated by our human experts, and fully traceable. The evidence your team needs to demonstrate compliance to an external party is not assembled after the fact – it is produced as a natural output of the assessment process itself.

For a compliance leader, that changes the nature of the work. Less time spent on the mechanics of research and evidence gathering. More time spent on the judgement calls that actually require expertise – interpreting grey areas, advising product teams, identifying market opportunities that competitors with slower compliance processes will not be able to move into as quickly.

The Build vs. Buy Question

For organizations weighing whether to build a compliance AI solution in-house, the most important thing to understand is what that decision actually involves. It’s not a technology problem – it is a data and expertise problem, and it is one that cannot be shortcut.

Adherent’s regulatory dataset took almost twenty-five years to build. It is continuously maintained by a global team of regulatory specialists whose full-time job is ensuring it is accurate, current, and complete. Building your own solution, for many organizations, means starting that process from zero.

Years of curation, validation, and expert oversight before the outputs are reliable enough to act on. Most organizations that have gone down that path have found themselves maintaining a system that demands as much resource as it saves.

Adherent gives you the dataset, the architecture, and the human governance model – already built, already validated, and continuously maintained by the people who built it.

What This Means If You Are Already a Customer

For the organizations that have trusted Adherent for years, the message is straightforward: the platform you rely on is not going away, and the relationships you have built with our team are not changing.

What Adherent adds is a step forward in what is possible – the speed, the intelligence, and the defensibility of the compliance decisions your team can make. If you have not already spoken to your customer success manager about what the new platform means for your program, I would encourage you to do so.

What This Means If You Are Evaluating Us for the First Time

If you are looking at Adherent alongside other options, there is one question worth asking of every alternative: where does the regulatory intelligence actually come from?

Adherent – our agentic AI product compliance platform – tells you what regulations actually apply to your specific products and markets, extracts the requirements that follow, and gives you the evidence to act on and defend every decision. Built on a dataset of 120,000+ regulations across 195 countries, it was not generated by a model or assembled from public sources. It was built over almost twenty-five years by experts who understand not just the content of the regulations, but the context, the nuance, and the consequences of misreading them.

That knowledge base is the foundation of everything our AI does, and it is what makes every output the platform produces defensible rather than merely plausible. If you want to understand what that looks like for your specific regulatory footprint and market ambitions, I would welcome the conversation.

See It for Yourself

If you weren’t there to see it live, you can watch our launch webinar on demand here – which includes a walkthrough of the platform, input from our leadership team and an open Q&A.

If you would prefer a conversation one to one, book a demo here and let us show you what this looks like for your business specifically.

Welcome to Adherent.