PART ONE OF THREE
Right now, everyone is being asked which AI they use. The question coming next is who takes ownership when it gets something wrong.
You don't sit in a single corporate meeting anywhere in the world at this stage where AI isn't part of the conversation. Agentic AI. How are we using AI. What's our AI position. Regulatory monitoring in Africa is no exception.
What's becoming clear to me is that people at certain levels are throwing jargon around without understanding the impact on the ground. And the ground in Africa looks very different than elsewhere. We have African regulators pushing out regulatory documents on Facebook and X. We have other regulators that have gone offline in the last six months. A gazette arrives as a photograph of a printed page, or it arrives three weeks late, or it doesn't arrive.
“It's no use having the AI conversation if you don't understand those nuances.”
Then there's what AI does to the documents themselves. You're going to see an increase in fraudulent documents. Funnily enough, we saw a version of this during COVID, when a lot of these jurisdictions went online in a hurry and the misinformation came with them. Faking a government gazette is now just so much easier. I'm sure it's going to start happening, and this time the fakes will look right.
So yes, use the tools at your disposal. You can and you should, and we do. But the conversation in the monitoring space has already moved past what the technology can do.
“Currently we're having the conversation around AI: what AI are you using, how AI-enabled you are. The conversation is moving very quickly to AI accountability.”
Three questions come with that. Where are you sourcing it? How are you sourcing it? And who's the warm body that's going to take ownership for it?
They're not rhetorical. Any legal or compliance team should be able to answer all three about the regulatory intelligence it relies on, whether you built it or you bought it.
Where it comes from matters because a regulator's own channel, a subscription service, a WhatsApp group and a model that won't tell you, are not the same thing. That difference only shows up on the day something goes wrong. How it reaches you matters because every step between the original instrument and the line in your board pack is a place to lose accuracy. Scraped, translated, summarised, or actually read by somebody who understands what they're reading. And the warm body matters because when the summary turns out to be wrong, and the filing or the licence or the deal was built on it, a person has to own that. Not a vendor. Not a model.
If you can't answer those three about your own monitoring today, you're carrying a risk nobody has priced. It looks calm right up until a fabricated amendment, or a real amendment nobody caught, reaches a decision.
I'll openly say that this is what we do at Sentinel. If a document hasn't come from an official source, it doesn't go out until we've confirmed with somebody at that regulator or that portfolio committee that we're allowed to publish it. It's why people trust us.
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This article was written by Beulah Lüttig, Director | Head of Operations at Afriwise Law Explorer (Pty) Ltd
