Why Haven’t You Told Legal and Compliance About AI Yet?

In many organisations, AI is already everywhere - but if you ask the legal or compliance team, you might hear a different story. Officially, there are a few cautious pilots. Unofficially, employees across the business are pasting data into tools and building their own workflows.

That silence between AI usage and the people paid to manage risk is not just awkward. It is dangerous.

The uncomfortable reality: AI is ahead of your governance

The pace of AI adoption inside organisations has outstripped most policies by a long way. While legal and compliance teams are still drafting position papers and scanning new regulations, employees are:

• Using consumer-grade AI tools to draft documents and analyse data.
• Experimenting with new platforms that have not been security-reviewed.
• Sharing customer, employee or supplier information without realising the implications.

None of this is malicious. People are trying to get their work done. But from a regulatory and reputational perspective, it is a ticking clock.

Why leaders hesitate to loop legal in

If AI is clearly a risk topic, why do so many leaders delay talking to legal and compliance? A few familiar reasons show up:

• Fear of being told “no” - the worry that raising the issue will shut down useful experimentation.
• Lack of clarity - not knowing exactly what is happening, so feeling they have nothing concrete to bring.
• Perception that “it’s just a tool” - treating AI like any other software rather than a new category with unique risks.

The irony is that waiting usually makes the eventual conversation harder, not easier. By the time a real incident happens, legal and compliance will be asking why they were not involved sooner.

The risk landscape is shifting fast

Regulators around the world are moving quickly on AI-related issues: data privacy, transparency, discrimination, IP, consumer protection and more. High-profile enforcement actions and legal cases are already making headlines.

That means your organisation’s exposure is not theoretical. If employees are using AI without clear gardrails, you may already be:

• Breaching data protection obligations.
• Infringing intellectual property rights.
• Making or supporting decisions in ways that are difficult to justify or audit.

A “wait and see” approach is effectively a decision to accept unknown levels of risk.

Bringing legal and compliance in as partners, not policemen

The goal is not to hand AI over to legal and compliance and step back. They cannot - and should not - own your entire AI strategy. But they do need a seat at the table from the start.

A better approach is to involve them as enablers:

• Share what is already happening, as honestly as you can.
• Ask them to help define simple, practical principles for safe AI use.
• Work together to prioritise the biggest risks and the most promising opportunities.

When legal and compliance understand the business upside as well as the downside, they are far more likely to support thoughtful, well-governed experimentation.

How an AI academy supports good governance

Governance is not just about policies; it is about behaviour. An AI academy is one of the most effective ways to embed that behaviour across the organisation.

By partnering closely with legal, risk and compliance, your academy can:

• Translate high-level policies into practical do’s and don’ts for everyday tasks.
• Provide examples of “good” and “bad” AI use that are specific to your context.
• Build ongoing feedback loops so that issues spotted in training inform future policy updates.

The result is a living governance framework, not a static PDF that nobody reads.

Starting the conversation you have been avoiding

If you recognise that your legal and compliance teams are not yet fully in the loop on AI, the best time to fix that is now. A simple starting point could be:

• 1:1 conversations with the heads of legal, risk and compliance to share your current AI activity and concerns.
• A joint working group to map existing AI use, approved and unapproved.
• A plan to build AI governance into your training, change and communication programmes.

You do not need all the answers before you invite them in. In fact, it is better if you do not pretend to.

The question is not whether legal and compliance will get involved with AI - they will. The real question is whether they join as early partners in a strategic shift, or as the people called in after something has already gone wrong.