Adherent Named a Double Finalist at the Digital Media Awards 2026

Adherent has been named as a finalist in two categories at the 2026 Irish Digital Media Awards: Best Use of AI and Best Tech & Innovation.

Both nominations recognise “A New Chapter: Compliance & Risks is Now Adherent,” the rebrand and platform launch that took a product compliance business founded in 2002 and rebuilt it as an agentic AI product compliance platform. Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony in Dublin on Friday 9 October 2026.

The Two Categories

Best Use of AI sits in the awards’ Technology, Platform and Strategy group. It recognises AI implementations that deliver real business growth, a better customer experience and measurable return. Judges score four things: innovation, user experience, business impact, and how well the solution was actually implemented and integrated.

Best Tech & Innovation recognises businesses that have created or applied groundbreaking technology. Judges look for originality and creativity in the technology itself, and for evidence that it changed how the work performed.

From a hugely competitive field that includes agencies, energy providers, broadcasters and national organisations, being shortlisted tells us the judges saw the same thing our customers do. Purpose-built AI that’s anchored to verified regulatory sources, changes what a compliance team can do.

What the Entry Covered

Product compliance has a volume problem. A new product entering a single market faces an average of 1,002 regulations, and a typical product category sees roughly 217 regulatory changes every month. In 2025 there were 4,539 global regulatory notifications, a record high. No team gets ahead of that by reading faster.

The work behind these nominations was about closing that gap. Adherent’s AI agents monitor global regulatory sources continuously, map what changes to your specific products, materials and markets, turn dense regulatory text into clear requirements, and rank what matters by urgency and business exposure. Ari, our AI product compliance assistant, executes those workflows so your experts spend their time on decisions instead of admin.

The difference shows up in time. Matching and assessing 100 key regulations takes a manual team working with a general-purpose LLM four to six months. Adherent does it in under 10 minutes, with a 99 percent reduction in manual assessment work. Your experts still make the final call, and every output stays traceable back to a human-verified source.

That foundation is what makes the AI defensible. Since 2002 our regulatory experts have assessed more than 120,000 regulations across 195 countries, in 29 languages, working with 31 global knowledge partners. Nearly 25 years of that expertise now sits underneath the platform.

About the Irish Digital Media Awards

The Irish Digital Media Awards are run by Ashville Media Group and are now in their 23rd year, making them one of the longest-running benchmarks for digital work in Ireland. They recognise excellence across the country’s creative, tech and media sectors, judged on digital innovation, creativity and measurable impact.

Entries are reviewed by a judging panel drawn from across the industry, with category-specific scoring criteria. The 2025 awards drew more than 400 entries from 120 entrants. This year’s categories span Best Use of Media, Best Use of Technology, Platform and Strategy, and Best in Class.

When are the Winners Announced?

Winners will be revealed at the Digital Media Awards ceremony on Friday 9 October 2026, from 6.00pm to 11.30pm at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre, Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8. More than 500 industry professionals are expected to attend. Full details are on the awards night page, and the complete 2026 shortlist is published on the Digital Media Awards site.

Follow the night on social with #DMA2026.

What this Means for the Teams We Work with

Compliance has spent years being treated as a cost centre, the team you go to for permission. The shift we are building for is the opposite one: compliance as decision support, as a way to launch products faster and open markets sooner. Our State of Product Compliance 2026 report, based on more than 500 compliance leaders, found that 69 percent name remediation as their biggest challenge and 62 percent are being asked to provide evidence to external stakeholders.

Stop reacting. Start anticipating.

Want to see what the judges saw? Book a demo and we will walk you through how Adherent’s AI agents handle regulatory change for your product portfolio. You can also read more about Adherent or catch up on our latest announcements in the newsroom.