Why EHS leaders are investing in confident compliance

The state of play: What's changing in regulation?

Mary Foley, Expert Services Strategy Director at Enhesa and a Forbes contributor, opened the webinar by setting the scene: Regulatory uncertainty is rising while the playing field becomes less level across regions.

• In the EU, companies are watching adjustments to sustainability reporting and due diligence requirements, alongside timing shifts for measures like deforestation rules.
• In the US, federal rollbacks are expected to be offset by a surge in state level activity (with California a bellwether).
• Several Asia‑Pacific jurisdictions are tightening rules on chemicals, climate, and circularity. The result is more rules from more places — and more complexity for global operations.

Why it matters

Markets and investors are also demanding standardized, comparable, decision‑grade data.

Compliance evidence isn’t just for regulators; it’s essential for customers, lenders, and employees who are scrutinizing companies’ resilience and responsibility.

Verdantix 2025 global corporate survey: What EHS leaders are prioritizing

Guest speaker Zane Idris shared findings from Verdantix’s 2025 Global Corporate Survey of 300+ EHS executives across 24 industries

• Monitoring regulatory change ranks among the top operational goals for the next two years, with just over half of respondents rating it “most important” or “very important”.
• Regulation is the primary driver of EHS tech investment. 31% named regulatory shifts as the single most important factor, with another 34% calling it very important.
• Spending is tilting toward environmental initiatives. ESG and sustainability again lead planned budget increases, closely followed by greenhouse gas monitoring and environmental compliance — reflecting the role EHS teams play in delivering reliable environmental data for enterprise reporting.
• Chemicals remain a core challenge. The toughest issues include eradicating/substituting hazardous substances and keeping pace with global chemical rules. Tracking regulatory change is a top‑three challenge on its own.

Idris also highlighted downstream consequences when compliance fails — legal and financial penalties, operational disruption (including injuries, incidents, and site shutdowns), reputational damage, and intensified regulator scrutiny.

What we heard from the audience: Priorities and pressures

Two live polls taken during the webinar echoed the research:

• Biggest budget movers: Attendees most commonly identified ESG/sustainability for the largest spending increase in 2026, with safety hazards & risk mitigation as a close second.
• Top decision driver: Keeping up with the pace of regulatory change led the pack, followed by the need to demonstrate ROI — underscoring that EHS leaders are balancing external change with internal expectation‑setting.

Where AI fits — and where it doesn’t (yet)

Both panelists agreed that AI has real potential for improving EHS compliance — from accelerating the detection of regulatory changes to parsing dense requirements into actionable summaries. But successful use depends on three prerequisites:

1. Clean, structured data

Start by inventorying sources, standardizing taxonomies and units, and moving records out of email, shared drives, and ad‑hoc spreadsheets into governed systems. Validating at the point of capture, mapping lineage, and archiving superseded versions means AI models learn from consistent, trustworthy data grounded in truth.

2. Modern, interoperable tech stacks

Choose platforms with open APIs, event streaming, and identity integration so data flows securely across EHS, LIMS, maintenance, PLM, and ERP. Canonical data models and vendor‑neutral connectors are preferable; it’s pivotal to retire duplicative point tools that recreate silos.

3. Human-in-the-loop governance

Given the stakes in EHS, teams must validate outputs, control sensitive data, and prioritize safety and accuracy over speed.

This means defining use cases, risks, and approval paths before deployment. Expert review of safety‑critical outputs, log decisions and prompts is a must. And processes must always protect personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive site data.

Rigor is imperative — measuring accuracy, bias, and drift. Teams should be encouraged to thoroughly stress-test autonomy until the controls in place are proven to be reliable under audit.

What do Enhesa clients experience? The ROI of a centralized approach

Enhesa recently commissioned a major global consulting firm to study our clients’ ROI. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, including 300 surveys and 100 interviews with industry leaders, the firm measured the positive impact of centralized, standardized EHS compliance programs on organizations. Respondents reported:

• 15–20% improvement in EHS team effectiveness, as time shifts from searching for requirements to executing on them.
• 25–30% cost savings from consolidating multiple providers into a single, global source of truth.
• ~10% reduction in total cost of compliance, including fewer breaches and lower legal, audit, and insurance overheads.
• 100% of senior stakeholders expressing greater confidence and trust when they had direct visibility into requirements and status.

These findings mirror what we see in practice: closing compliance gaps and standardizing data improves day‑to‑day efficiency and reduces the likelihood and impact of non-compliance.

What EHS leaders can do now

To build the business case — and the operating muscle — for confident compliance:

• Centralize regulatory intelligence. Establish a single, harmonized source of truth for requirements, applicability, and change alerts across all regions and sites.
• Standardize processes and taxonomies. Replace duplicative local solutions and manual re‑keying with common workflows and definitions to improve data quality and comparability.
• Quantify risk and ROI in CFO language. Tie investments to reduced likelihood of fines, avoided shutdowns, and reclaimed capacity (e.g., time saved per FTE).
• Target chemical and product hot spots. Prioritize substitution of hazardous substances and strengthen SDS and inventory discipline to de‑risk operations and supply chains.
• Strengthen cross‑functional collaboration. Bring EHS, sustainability, finance, procurement, and operations together, aligned around the same cross-organizational compliance data, to strengthen and accelerate strategic decisions and prioritize trade‑offs.
• Lay the groundwork for trustworthy AI. Clean up data, modernize integrations, and define guardrails so AI can augment — not replace — expert judgment.

The bottom line

In today’s fast‑changing environment, confident compliance is a competitive advantage. It equips leadership to move faster into new markets, withstand regulatory turbulence, and earn trust from stakeholders who expect transparency and resilience. With a centralized, data‑driven approach — and a clear line to ROI — EHS teams can claim (and keep) a seat at the strategic table.