To understand the real benefits of artificial intelligence, it is instructive to look at why it is so difficult and costly to manage the compliance burden in the traditional way. In the area of AML, for example, financial institutions have transaction monitoring systems that generate alerts when potentially unusual activity is detected. In order to be thorough and avoid heavy fines, the systems are extremely sensitive and thus generate large numbers of false positives. This means that compliance staff must scrutinize each alert, investigate the activity, and determine whether it is unusual and rises to the level of being reportable in the form of a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). The problem is magnified since financial institutions typically have multiple systems, making it necessary to compile data from numerous sources in an investigation.