By Paul Okhrem · paul-okhrem.com
The compliance analyst I spoke with described her day the way most people describe a commute they've stopped noticing — with a kind of resigned acceptance.
Every new supplier onboarding required reviewing three to seven documents: contracts, insurance certificates, data processing agreements, regulatory certifications. Cross-referencing clauses. Flagging gaps. Writing up findings. For each supplier. On a team that was doing 30 to 40 of these a month.
The work wasn't complex in the sense of requiring rare expertise. It was complex in the sense of requiring sustained attention across large, dense documents — finding the right clause, checking it against the standard, noting whether it met the threshold or didn't. Multiply that by 80 pages per document, five documents per supplier, and 40 suppliers a month, and you have a team that's spending most of its capacity on extraction and comparison rather than judgment.
This is exactly the kind of problem RAG is suited for.
