Policy Summaries and the Bottleneck in Modern Approvals: Is AI the Solution?

According to a Navex blog post, delays in policy approvals have become a persistent problem for compliance and risk teams, even when proposed changes are straightforward. The article opens with a familiar scenario: a policy update is ready, the rationale is sound, but the review process drags on for weeks as stakeholders struggle to find time to engage. During that delay, the underlying risks the policy is meant to address remain unresolved. The overview makes clear that this is no longer a marginal inefficiency but a structural issue in modern compliance programs. This is where AI policy summaries can help.

Policies now carry significantly more weight than they did in the past. Rapidly changing privacy and data protection requirements, emerging expectations around AI governance, and the realities of hybrid work have expanded both the scope and sensitivity of policy content. As a result, more stakeholders across legal, compliance, HR, IT, and business teams are required to review and approve updates. The workload has increased, but available time has not, creating predictable bottlenecks in approval chains.

Navex attributes many approval delays to practical constraints rather than resistance. Feedback is scattered across emails, chat tools, document comments, and meetings, making it difficult to consolidate and compare. Multiple versions of policies circulate across drives, creating confusion over which draft is authoritative. In parallel, reviewers may lose track of where they sit in the approval sequence or when their input is required.

The article then outlines how AI-enabled policy management tools can support faster reviews. It states that AI can generate policy summaries for new documents and highlight changes in updated versions. Reviewers still retain access to full policy text, but the upfront cognitive load is reduced.

For compliance leaders, policy summaries and change-focused reviews can reduce friction in approval workflows without removing human judgment. The article does not claim that AI fixes or eliminates delays, but it positions structured summaries as a realistic way to keep policies moving while risks continue to evolve.