Adherent Wins Silver at the Digital Media Awards 2026

Adherent has won Silver for Best Tech & Innovation at the 2026 Irish Digital Media Awards. Adam Roylance, Senior Growth Digital Marketing Manager, and Dhruv Kabra, Senior AI Engineer, accepted the award on behalf of the team at a ceremony in Dublin on Friday 9 October 2026. 

The win recognises our rebrand from Compliance & Risks to Adherent and the platform launch that came with it, which transformed a product compliance business founded in 2002 into an agentic AI product compliance platform. The same entry was named a double finalist in September, shortlisted for both Best Tech & Innovation and Best Use of AI.

What the Judges Looked For

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 is performed.

Best Use of AI, the other category we were shortlisted for, sits in the awards’ Technology, Platform and Strategy group and recognises AI implementations that deliver real business growth, a better customer experience and measurable return. 

The competition came from across sectors, with entries from agencies, energy providers, broadcasters and national organisations. Winning Silver against that field is independent recognition of something our customers already see every day: AI built specifically for product compliance, and grounded in verified regulatory sources, does what general-purpose AI can’t.

The Problem We Solved

Product compliance is, above all, a volume problem. Take one product into one market and it faces an average of 1,002 regulations. Across a typical product category, around 217 regulations change every month, and 2025 brought a record 4,539 global regulatory notifications. Reading faster won’t solve that.

Our entry set out a different approach. Our AI agents monitor global regulatory sources around the clock and match each change to your products, materials and markets. They turn dense regulatory text into clear requirements, then rank those requirements by urgency and business exposure. Ari, our AI product compliance assistant, runs these workflows, so your team can spend its time on decisions rather than admin.

The clearest measure is time. Give a manual team 100 key regulations to match and assess, and the job takes four to six months, even with a general-purpose LLM helping. Adherent completes it in under 10 minutes, cutting manual assessment work by 99 percent. Your experts still make the final call, and every output traces back to a human-verified source.

That is what makes the technology defensible, not just fast. Since 2002, we have assessed more than 120,000 regulations across 195 countries and 29 languages, working alongside a global network of knowledge partners. Close to 25 years of regulatory expertise now sits underneath the platform.

On the Night

More than 500 industry professionals attended the ceremony at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre, hosted by broadcaster Anna Daly. Now in its 23rd year, the Irish Digital Media Awards, run by Ashville Media Group, received a record number of entries in 2026. 

“The level of work on display this year was simply world-class.” – Jill Thornton, Senior Event Manager, Ashville Media Group

Ashville has published the full 2026 winners list.

What Comes Next

For years, businesses have treated compliance as a cost centre, the team you go to for permission. We are building for the opposite: compliance as decision support, so your products reach market sooner and new markets open earlier.

More than 500 compliance leaders took part in our State of Product Compliance 2026 report. Sixty-nine percent named remediation as their biggest challenge, and 62 percent now provide compliance evidence to external stakeholders. That is a function moving towards the centre of the business.

Stop reacting. Start anticipating.

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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.