"You don't want to be lagging behind, because that puts you in the spotlight," said Alma Angotti, a former senior enforcer with the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network who now works as a partner at the consultancy Guidehouse Inc. "It will at some point be a regulatory expectation." The more stringent compliance expectations of President Biden's administration have prompted companies that are lagging to try to catch up, Ms. Angotti said. New AI-focused offerings are designed to reform the laborious approach to compliance that has long prevailed at many financial institutions and other entities. Compliance departments traditionally have used painstaking manual approaches to try to find the proverbial needle of crime amid the mountainous haystack of legitimate transactions and well-behaved clients. AI can do the job better, require less staff and enable continuous check-ups on customers and transactions for money-laundering issues and sanctions violations, proponents say.