September 26, 2025

How AI Is Redefining GRC for the Modern Enterprise

GRC’s New Role in the UK Boardroom

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) is no longer a back-office function. In the UK, it now sits firmly on the boardroom agenda. With the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) Consumer Duty fully in force, the Senior Managers & Certification Regime (SMCR) embedding accountability, and Operational Resilience requirements due by March 2025, GRC leaders face a landscape defined by heightened scrutiny, accountability, and continuous evidence demands. The stakes are high: firms must not only comply, but also demonstrate that compliance is proactive, explainable, and customer-centric. Increasingly, GRC is not a shield against risk but a catalyst for trust, agility, and sustainable growth.

From Control to Catalyst: A Shift in Mindset

Traditionally, GRC was seen as a cost centre, managing regulatory updates, fragmented audit trails, and siloed risk registers. But in today’s environment, this approach is inadequate. Boards want innovation without sacrificing resilience. CIOs, CROs, COOs, and ESG leaders all rely on GRC insights, yet often lack a unified view. At the same time, the FCA’s focus on outcomes forces firms to prove they can identify and act on risks to vulnerable customers in real time. The emerging paradigm is risk orchestration rather than risk aversion, turning compliance into foresight and competitive advantage. This is where AI in GRC is stepping up, helping enterprises shift from static controls to intelligent compliance that adapts to regulatory and market changes in real time.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

UK regulators are making it clear: failure to comply has real financial consequences. In recent years, leading banks and financial institutions have paid hundreds of millions of pounds in fines for breaches ranging from AML failings to inadequate consumer protection. In 2022, the FCA fined a major UK bank nearly £108 million for serious AML control weaknesses. Other high-profile enforcement actions have targeted conduct risk, mis-selling, and failures in complaint handling, each carrying reputational damage alongside financial penalties. Globally, the banking sector paid more than $5 billion in fines in 2023 alone for non-compliance, underscoring the scale of risk. For UK institutions, these fines serve as a stark reminder: compliance gaps are not just operational inefficiencies but strategic and financial risks.

Enter Agentic AI

Agentic AI systems of autonomous agents that can perceive, reason, and act across workflows, is proving a breakthrough in GRC. Unlike traditional automation, agentic AI is adaptive: it can gather data from disparate systems, triage risks, escalate anomalies, and generate auditable evidence without constant manual intervention. This is not just automation but enterprise automation designed for compliance-intensive environments. Three qualities make it especially relevant to UK firms:

• Embedded explainability: every action is logged, supporting robust AI governance and enabling senior managers to show “reasonable steps” under SMCR.
• Continuous monitoring: agents don’t wait for quarterly reviews; they flag exceptions in near-real time, driving continuous compliance intelligence.
• Customer-centricity: agents can detect and document risks to vulnerable customers, directly addressing Consumer Duty obligations.

The result is not just regulatory alignment but a shift from firefighting to foresight through a modern GRC automation platform.

UK-Specific Pressures Driving Adoption

The UK market is uniquely primed for agentic AI adoption:

• Consumer Duty evidence: Boards must sustain proof of fair outcomes across open and closed products. Agentic systems can generate “Outcome Evidence Packs” monthly, reducing preparation from weeks to hours.
• Operational Resilience: By March 2025, firms must demonstrate they can remain within impact tolerances under “severe but plausible” scenarios. Agents can model dependencies, test tolerances, and propose recovery playbooks in real time.
• Surveillance governance: FCA market reviews highlight weaknesses in surveillance model testing. Agentic AI can autonomously run drift tests, validate thresholds, and compile regulator-ready documentation, using machine learning in compliance testing to adapt to changing patterns.

In all three, the theme is the same: compliance must be continuous, auditable, and cost-effective.

Introducing Purple Fabric: GRC Reinvented

This is where Purple Fabric, IntellectAI’s enterprise-grade agentic AI platform, enters the story. Positioned not as a tool but as a business impact platform, Purple Fabric reimagines GRC through multi-agent digital experts that embed directly into enterprise workflows and deliver true GRC automation.

Multi-Agent in Action

• Complaints Investigation & Redress: A UK wealth manager faced a 10,000+ complaint backlog with less than 30% resolved within SLA timelines. Manual investigations took over 50 days per case. Purple Fabric’s 20+ specialised agents reduced the process from weeks to minutes by automating evidence gathering, case dossier creation, investigation, and adjudication — all with human oversight. The outcome: SLA compliance improved, backlog reduced, and regulator confidence restored.
• Regulatory Policy Compliance: With UK regulations evolving rapidly, firms often struggled with fragmented impact tracing and audit exposure. Purple Fabric’s agents ingest new regulations, map them against internal controls, and generate compliance mapping reports with traceable audit trails. Result: 70% reduction in manual review time and 60% improvement in audit readiness.
• Client 360 for Consumer Duty:FCA’s focus on vulnerable customers means firms need holistic, forward-looking insights. Purple Fabric’s Client 360 agent analyses years of structured and unstructured customer data to flag risks, opportunities, and vulnerabilities. Beyond compliance, this fosters trust, retention, and higher share of wallet.

Why Purple Fabric Resonates in the UK Market

Three factors make Purple Fabric particularly suited for UK enterprises:

• Alignment with FCA priorities, from Consumer Duty to SMCR to Operational Resilience, with agents designed to deliver auditable, regulator-ready outputs.
• Composable design, allowing firms to start with a single use case such as complaints and scale to enterprise-wide GRC.
• Business impact focus, delivering outcomes such as productivity increases of up to 10x, 60% cost reduction, and dramatically improved complaint-related SLA compliance.

Looking Ahead: The Future of GRC in the UK

As FCA scrutiny deepens and fines continue to climb, UK firms will need GRC systems that are proactive rather than reactive, continuous rather than periodic, and explainable rather than opaque. By embedding AI in GRC through platforms like Purple Fabric, organisations can combine intelligent compliance with scalable automation, strengthening resilience while reducing cost. With agentic AI, GRC automation platforms are no longer about ticking boxes; they are about creating trust, foresight, and sustainable growth. For UK enterprises navigating 2025’s regulatory deadlines, the firms that thrive will not be those that simply comply but those that transform compliance into confidence.

Author:

Ishwarya Pandian
Sr. Marketing Manager