In the age of AI and remote work, HR leaders are dealing with tough compliance challenges, and they must have strategies to keep everything straight and in order for their organizations.
To learn the best practices for what HR leaders should do right now to deal with compliance issues, we sat down with leading experts to discuss all things compliance in honor of HRDA’s Compliance Week, and what they said shocked us.
Joined by Gwendolyn Lee Hassan, Vice President & Chief Compliance Officer of Unisys Corporation, Randy Lytes Jr, Assistant Director of Equity & Compliance for Michigan State University, and Margarita Ramos, Former SVP, HR Compliance for Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, we tackled the biggest compliance risks HR will face in 2026, and what they can do to prevent them.
From AI governance, classifying workers, remote and global jurisdictional risk, data privacy, and employee monitoring/surveillance, the risks are only growing more and more imperceptible. And the center of it all? AI. Here are the 3 biggest takeaways we had from our panel discussion webinar!
Audit, Audit, Audit
Complacency is the culprit of many compliance issues. Things that are taken at face value and left without scrutiny can fester and grow into larger and larger problems down the line.
Ramos was especially adamant that HR professionals should be questioning their vendors, as many times companies keep deals simply because they’re already in place, and not because they provide the most benefit. Citing the recent workplace lawsuit, Mobley vs. Workday, all three experts expressed concern in overuse of AI and how many data leaks and privacy concerns it can raise.
Lytes put heavy emphasis on auditing, internally and externally, to examine who’s using AI, how their using it and if it’s appropriate, as many employees freely upload sensitive information to platforms such as ChatGPT without company knowledge.
That’s why HR professionals need to conduct routine audits to ensure they’re properly questioning systems that are in place and are aware of how exactly work is getting done.
Remote Risks
After the boom of remote work post-Covid, AI has only complicated remote work in every possible way. As Hassan explained, AI that alters camera feeds, voice, location, and work employees produce leaves the door open for bad actors. From faking interviews to impersonating employees of different nationalities and providing false credentials, there is an endless slew of risks easily accessible to remote work thanks to AI.
But hope is not lost, as counteractive measures to handle these issues are just as easily implemented, so long as HR professionals are diligent and steadfast in their efforts. Ensuring records of interviews are properly reviewed before each step, properly tracking computer locations, and having frequent check-ins with employees helps handle many of these issues. All it takes is a steady and attentive HR team to notice compliance risks before they grow into compliance nightmares.
Overreliance and Underutilizing
AI has been touted as a complete revolution to the workforce, but as we understand more of its capabilities, we also learn more of its limitations, and awareness of them is critical in keeping your workforces’ privacy safe and your employees capable.
Without proper AI guidance and rules, human oversight of AI work will slip, and mistakes will begin to slip through the cracks. Whether it be new employees who have only used AI to do their work, or leadership who have abandoned all pretense to invest in AI, an overreliance on the software will grow any faults AI systems have into chasms of legal nightmares.
It also stagnates employee growth, as they underutilize other skills with an overreliance on AI and never grow to the point of improving or moving up in the company. When your managers set their sites on retirement in 5-10 years, and no employee has a concrete understanding of the business and what work they do because they haven’t needed to, what will the leadership crisis do to growing companies? If you want to make a business strategy that sets your business up for perpetual success, and not just immediate returns, proper AI governance needs to be installed.
As any HR professional can tell you, compliance is a vast and complicated topic. It was clear from our discussion with leading experts, that in 2026, AI is going to be the root of many compliance issues in the workplace. But with diligence and awareness, however, HR teams can set their business up for success in a world that only ever seems to change faster and faster.