Editor’s note: I am a columnist for Compliance Week.

Compliance Week recently released its Practitioner’s Briefing, which “is crafted as a high-level recap of Compliance Week’s 2026 National Conference (CW 26), held in Washington, D.C., in May. Whether you were there or wished to be, this briefing will bring you up to speed. The briefing captures the six themes that pervaded three days of panel discussion and the networking conversations between them, with practical actions you can implement in the next ninety days.”

The compliance profession is entering the proof era. Policies still matter, but regulators, boards, and employees are asking a harder question: Can the organization demonstrate that its controls operate in practice? That is the central lesson from the Practitioner’s Briefing. Across six themes, the briefing describes a function under pressure from rapid AI adoption, faster whistleblower timelines, redistributed enforcement, expanding third-party exposure, and sharper board expectations.

Today I want to explore the themes and initiatives from the Practitioner’s Briefing. This is not about six disconnected initiatives covered at CW 26. It is an operating model that connects governance, data, accountability, and escalation around existing risks. You can use the next 90 days to produce evidence that the program knows where its risks sit, who owns the controls, how failures surface, and what happens next.

AI Governance: Accountability Must Follow Adoption

AI makes the policy-to-proof gap visible. The Practitioner’s Briefing reports that 83 percent of compliance functions have AI in production, while only 25 percent of leaders are confident in the governance controls. That is not primarily a policy problem. It is an ownership and control-design problem.

Start with your AI inventory. A defensible AI register should identify the tool, approved use case, business owner, data involved, vendor, model, access rights, validation method, human reviewer, retention rule, incident path, and kill-switch authority. Tool approval by IT cannot substitute for use-case approval by Legal, Compliance, Privacy, Security, and the accountable business leader. One platform may be acceptable for drafting training content and unacceptable for evaluating employees or third parties.

The NIST AI Risk Management Framework and ISO/IEC 42001 can help organize this work, but a framework is not the control. The control is the approval record, test result, exception log, monitoring evidence, and documented decision. Compliance should also assume that prompts, summaries, transcripts, and agent logs are discoverable business records. Retention and legal hold procedures must catch those artifacts before the first dispute or investigation forces the question.

AI in Compliance Operations: Redesign the Work

The Practitioner’s Briefing draws a useful line between AI enablement and AI theater. Strong programs redesign a workflow around AI. Weak programs bolt AI onto a slow process and call it transformation. Due diligence, regulatory tracking, training development, and self-service policy guidance are sensible starting points because the work can be scoped, tested, and measured.

Each deployment needs acceptance criteria. Validate performance against known outcomes, constrain source material where accuracy matters, monitor drift, require human review for high-risk decisions, and define escalation when the system is uncertain. Measure return on investment first in hours returned to higher-value work. Faster output that creates more review, remediation, or false confidence is not efficiency. It is control debt.

Speak-Up and Investigations: Trust Is the Control

The Practitioner’s Briefing reports that eight in ten US employees witnessed misconduct during the prior year, yet fewer than three-quarters reported it. That gap is not solved by adding another intake channel. It is solved by showing employees that reporting is safe, fair, and consequential.

One of the Practitioner’s Briefing’s most practical recommendations is to audit the career outcomes of the last 20 employees who raised concerns. Review performance ratings, promotions, transfers, compensation, leave, and departures. Patterns in those records may reveal retaliation or career stagnation that hotline statistics will never show. Pair that review with defined post-report monitoring and documented check-ins with reporters.

Speed is now part of program effectiveness. The briefing highlights a 120-day DOJ window to investigate qualifying internal reports and decide whether voluntary self-disclosure is appropriate. CCOs should calendar that period, establish rapid triage, identify decision rights, preserve evidence immediately, and maintain a standing disclosure team. The goal is not a rushed conclusion. The goal is to prevent delay, unclear ownership, or inadequate resources from deciding for the company.

Enforcement Has Shifted, Not Disappeared

Lower federal case counts are not a safe harbor. The Practitioner’s Briefing describes enforcement as redistributed across state Attorneys General, self-regulatory organizations, the False Claims Act, and future matters still inside applicable limitation periods. A quieter headline environment can encourage exactly the wrong management response: reduced staffing, deferred remediation, and lower investment in controls.

The business discipline is straightforward. Monitor the full enforcement ecosystem, not one federal docket. Maintain the strictest applicable standard as the practical global baseline. Preserve the ability to investigate, cooperate, remediate, and disclose. Most importantly, do not confuse a change in enforcement cadence with a change in underlying legal or ethical risk. Today’s control gap may simply be tomorrow’s case.

Third-Party Risk: Manage the Entire Lifecycle

Third-party risk management is no longer a narrow anti-bribery process. The Practitioner’s Briefing places sanctions, forced labor, transnational crime, material support exposure, supply-chain integrity, and embedded AI inside the modern TPRM remit. That expansion requires a move from onboarding diligence to lifecycle control.

Monitor material relationships from selection through offboarding, with risk-based refreshes, event-driven alerts, beneficial ownership checks, adverse media review, and clear remediation ownership. For AI-enabled vendors, procurement should require disclosure of material fourth- and fifth-party dependencies. Contract terms should address model provenance, data lineage, audit rights, incident notice, control changes, and the ability to explain consequential decisions.

List screening alone is increasingly thin protection. High-risk supply chains may require route mapping, chokepoint analysis, and source-verified information reviewed in context by humans. AI can compress the initial diligence cycle, but it does not replace judgment on coercion, shell companies, access payments, or other facts that demand legal and operational analysis.

Board Reporting and Culture: Lead With the Problem

Directors want a compliance report that begins with bad news, explains the risk, and shows the response. That is the board-reporting message in the Practitioner’s Briefing. Activity counts belong in the appendix. The main discussion should address control failures, investigation aging, retaliation indicators, overdue high-risk diligence, AI exceptions, remediation status, and emerging exposure compared with peers.

This approach also supports a Caremark-style oversight record. The board needs credible information systems, timely escalation of red flags, and evidence that management and directors responded. A between-meetings protocol with the audit or risk committee chair is therefore a control, not a courtesy.

Culture is equally operational. The briefing reports that direct managers and immediate colleagues exert the strongest influence on 80 percent of employees, while only 58 percent of organizations evaluate how results were achieved. Compliance should train managers to receive concerns, audit incentives as rigorously as financial controls, and make conduct part of performance and promotion decisions. The real code of conduct is what the organization rewards, tolerates, and corrects.

A 90-Day Agenda for CCOs

1. Build the evidence map. Select the highest-risk obligations in AI, investigations, and third-party management. For each one, identify the owner, control, evidence, escalation path, and board metric.
2. Test AI governance. Reconcile the official AI inventory with procurement records, browser access, expense data, and employee attestations. Review several approved use cases from request through monitoring.
3. Stress-test investigations. Tabletop a significant internal report against the 120-day decision window. Confirm preservation, privilege, staffing, disclosure authority, and board communication.
4. Rebuild TPRM around lifecycle risk. Segment critical third parties, define continuous-monitoring triggers, review AI dependencies, and assign remediation deadlines with accountable owners.
5. Change the board report. Put the three most significant problems first. Add peer comparison, trend data, remediation aging, and decisions required from the board or management.

The Compliance Lesson

The Practitioner’s Briefing is not fundamentally a technology story or an enforcement story. It is a program-effectiveness story. The effective compliance function can identify risk, assign accountability, test controls, learn from failures, and show its work. Policies establish expectations. Evidence establishes credibility. In the next 90 days, that distinction should drive the agenda of every CCO, executive team, and board committee responsible for corporate integrity.