Awesome Compliance

We took a group of legal counsels out on a boat. Asked them: "Will AI replace you"? Everyone agreed: no, AI won't replace us. But we'll be replaced by the people who use it. A few other things I keep thinking about which were mentioned during the panel on the boat by Chaniel van Ballegooij, Leonie Peters Joost van Kleef Keelan Toomey "Don't mask your expertise with AI. Use it to work faster, sure. But your judgment is what clients pay for. Don't hide behind the tool." "Judgment isn't going anywhere. AI can draft a contract in seconds. It can't tell you if signing it is the right move for your client. That's still you." "The way we work will change. That's just true. The question is whether you fight it or lean into it." Honestly? The best part wasn't talking about AI. It was being outside. On the water. Together. Making actual human connection instead of talking to AI. Our jobs are evolving fast. But sitting there in the sunshine with smart people figuring it out together? I'm not worried. We'll adapt. We always do.

Someone just showed me the most cursed file in Europe by privacy counsels ;) POV: I tell someone I run a compliance tech company. Them: "Oh nice, we've got our RoPA handled." Me: "Amazing, what are you using?" Them: 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴 "Excel." Me: 🫠 Listen. I love Excel. Excel built the modern economy. Excel put a man on the moon (probably). But your Record of Processing Activities, the document that proves to regulators you actually know what personal data you have, where it lives, who touches it, and why, sitting in a tab called "RoPA_FINAL_v7_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx" that Frank from Finance has edit access to for some reason? That's not compliance... GDPR Article 30 did not survive eight years of enforcement so you could track 47 processing activities in a spreadsheet that explodes every time someone sorts a column or sneezes near the merge cells. If your RoPA can be ruined by a rogue ⌘Z, then I feel you.

I'm a Privacy Officer. And occasionallyI used to procrastinate on my own work. DPIAs. Vendor reviews. Compliance tasks I knew inside out. It wasn't about difficulty. I just... sometimes didn't want to start. Some days I'd find every reason not to open the file. I've been sitting with that for a while... You're supposed to love what you do, right? What I've realised is that I do love the work. I just sometimes didn’t want to start. That's changed now. I work differently, in a way that actually fits how my brain operates. And now… I find myself wanting to get started 😍

Getting called a “boomer” over a ROPA was not on my bingo card this week. But honestly… Marianne had a point. 😅 The old way of managing a ROPA is basically: Excel sheets, endless tabs, manual updates, version chaos, chasing business teams, rewriting the same things over and over again. And that’s just to maintain it. The crazy part is that most compliance work today is still work around the work: Updating fields. Copying information. Keeping records alive. Fixing outdated entries after something has already changed months ago. So we asked ourselves: What if AI just did all of that for you? Drop in an old Excel ROPA. AI agents enrich it. Vendors get recognised. Processes get linked. Fields update dynamically. Missing information gets surfaced. Tasks get triggered. Everything starts moving in minutes instead of weeks. Not because compliance professionals should do less thinking. But because I think they should spend less time maintaining systems and more time applying expertise. That’s the shift AI creates when it’s built specifically for Data Protection. (And yes… apparently knowing Excel shortcuts now qualifies you as a boomer.)

Some teams are finishing compliance work before the day even starts. I walked in at 8, ready to start the day. Marianne had already finished work most privacy teams would spread over days. And the interesting part? She wasn’t rushing. She was just… ahead. And enjoying it. There’s something slightly unusual about someone opening a compliance platform like it’s their favorite app. But once you understand what’s changing underneath, it makes sense. Less admin. Less starting from scratch. More actual thinking. That’s the shift. And it’s hard to ignore once you’ve seen it.

AI legal tools are everywhere right now. Every week a new one pops up in LinkedIn. Vibecoded. Or legit. “Have you seen this legal AI?” “Have you tried this AI tool?” And to be fair, many of them seem impressive. But after working in privacy and compliance for quite some time, I’ve noticed something. Compliance was never really about generating text faster. Good compliance means understanding context. Connecting decisions. Knowing when something actually works in your daily job. AI can do the heavy lifting. But someone still needs to shape the reasoning. That’s usually the moment many privacy and AI counsels start looking for something different. And sometimes… they find us 😜 That’s when privacy & AI compliance suddenly starts to feel… pretty awesome.