Why approvals drag more now than they used to
How long does it take for a policy update to make it through your approval chain? A week? A month?
For many teams, even simple changes get stuck in the review queue. The draft is ready, and the intent is clear, but the review cycle often stalls while stakeholders try to carve out the time to read and respond. Meanwhile, the risks you’re trying to manage stay open.
Policies carry more weight than they did years ago. Privacy and data protection rules shift often, technology and AI governance introduces new expectations and limitations, and hybrid work has created fresh questions about conduct and security between home and “the office.”
When a modern risk and compliance program spans different stakeholders across different teams, more people need to weigh in than the person who realizes you need a new policy. The workload involved in policy management has increased, but no one has magically been given extra hours to handle it.
The holdup in policy approvals
Most delays in the policy management process come from normal limits on how much anyone can take in. For example, if you need five individual stakeholders to approve updates to an existing policy, you might face several of these issues:
- Feedback is difficult to collect and compare as between email, chat tools, document comments and meetings, everyone responds in different ways
- Revisions pile up and different policy versions between local and shared drives confuse the process
- People lose track of what the process is and don’t realize they are next in the review queue
Where AI helps streamline policy approval
Within your policy and procedure management system, AI tools can help by cutting down the time it takes to complete manual review.
For new policies, AI can generate a concise summary suggestion that captures the main points, giving reviewers a quick overview before they read in full. For updated policies, it highlights the specific changes from the previous version so reviewers don’t have to compare two documents side by side.
Reviewers still have access to the full policy if they need to see it, but they spend less time trying to figure out what’s new or what the draft is trying to cover.
AI-powered Risk & Compliance
NAVEX One delivers transformational AI-powered compliance automation with tools for editing, analysis, due diligence and more.
Reduce cognitive load for your reviewers
Even experts need time to process dense material – and that time is hard to find. AI-generated summaries ease this workload without replacing expertise. Reviewers quickly get oriented to see what’s changed and can easily jump to the sections that may require more focused input.
There’s less backtracking and fewer “wait, I thought this meant…” conversations that stall approval and often feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
What this means for your risk and compliance program
When people have a straightforward entry point, the turnaround time when changes are needed becomes much faster – which means you can respond to emerging risks sooner. Combined with intelligent policy management software, AI-generated summaries also strengthen your audit trail: you can see who reviewed the draft, what their input was and when the approval happened without digging through emails or message threads.
Because policies underpin so much of your compliance work, clearer summaries and cleaner version histories make it easier to maintain the documentation your program relies on day to day.
How AI-assisted policy summaries improve alignment across your business
AI summaries make the approval stage smoother, but their broader value shows up once the policy reaches the rest of the business. Faster reviews mean updates move into distribution sooner, while clearer summaries make it easier for teams across your organization to understand what’s new and why. When your system also tracks versions, attestations and employee engagement, there’s no ambiguity about who saw which version or how far a change has reached.
If you want a closer look at how these pieces come together in practice – from automated workflows to change logs and resources to support employee compliance engagement – discover NAVEX One Policy & Procedure Management software today.
Policy Management Software | PolicyTech
NAVEX One Policy & Procedure Management software is a centralized solution that automates policy creation, approvals, distribution, attestations and tracking.
