Reprinted with permission. The article was first published in HR Executive on the February 23, 2026.

While the compliance landscape is growing murkier and more complex, a new report has found that many U.S. compliance programs are not taking full advantage of data analytics. This is inhibiting employers’ ability to create “more resilient, future-proof processes,” researchers say. 

The Next Leap: Technology, Trust and the Transformation of Compliance, from ethics and compliance technology and solutions provider LRN Corporation, is part of LRN’s decade-long research into “what drives safety and success.” Among this year’s critical findings is that only 34% of organizations actively use data analytics to evaluate compliance effectiveness.

According to Patsy Doerr, LRN’s chief people & culture officer, the data analytics finding is particularly difficult to ignore, given the steady investment increase in AI-enabled tools.

“That points to a real gap between technological access and effective use of that technology, which genuinely informs organizations’ understanding of risk and culture,” she says.

The current landscape for data analytics and compliance

In many cases, she adds, data is still being used primarily to document “activity vs impact.” Metrics such as training completion rates, policy acknowledgments and case volumes are important, but she notes they are largely backward-looking.

“They tell us what happened, not necessarily why it happened or what might happen next,” Doerr says. Without deeper analyses, organizations can miss patterns in employee concerns, recurring and differing areas of understanding or signals that indicate an uneven culture of speaking up across teams—the latter being a key component of inclusion and accountability.

“The challenge is less about collecting information and more about interpreting what data already exists,” Doerr says.

She also explains that organizations that are further along their data analytics journey tend to connect compliance data with broader operational and culture indicators, using that combined view to spot trends and assess whether interventions are truly influencing behavior.

“That requires clearer data governance, cross-functional and regional collaboration, and a shared understanding of what effective outcomes look like,” she says.

In the end, if employers want compliance to be truly data-driven and effective, the focus has to shift from “reporting metrics to extracting insight,” she says, adding that technology can accelerate that shift, but only when it’s paired with thoughtful analysis and accountability for turning insight into action.

“It’s time for a reset, one where culture, technology and accountability are tied together to drive impact and the behaviors necessary for these initiatives to truly be meaningful,” Doerr concludes.