One morning, the police arrive to arrest a man named Josef K. Josef K is an ordinary bank clerk with little to distinguish himself. He has no tickets to his name, no outstanding warrants. He can think of nothing he’s done wrong, nothing to explain the handcuffs slapped on his wrists.
Worse, none of the authorities can explain his crime either.
Things only get weirder from here. No one in the judicial system knows why he is summoned to court hearings. Yet Josef K is forced to defend himself. Desperate to resolve his legal matter, he tries to understand and fight his baffling case. Shirking his office duties, he visits innumerable drab, anonymous-looking buildings where he confronts petty bureaucrats.
“What’s going on?” He asks. “Please. Won’t someone tell me?”
None of the officials or lawyers will help. They just give him cryptic paperwork to fill out, passing him off from one department to the next. Isolated and fearful, Josef K grows paranoid the longer this drags on.
A year after his arrest two men mysteriously show up at his door. They take him away and execute him. We never do find out why.
Sound familiar?
This is the plot to Franz Kafka’s The Trial. It captures the soul-crushing nature of bureaucracy run amok. Written in the early 20th century, the novel offers lessons for today. Josef K may be seen as a stand-in for so many companies—overwhelmed not by competitors—but by compliance.
The inertia of process itself threatens to undermine the dreams of so many business owners. Rather than focus on priorities—innovating or customer acquisition—so many organizations must contend with an ever-expanding bureaucracy, one that grinds away at us inexorably.
“Today’s companies face a maze of rules just to stay operational,” explains Eric Sydell, CEO of Vero AI, a generative AI-native platform that automates compliance by analyzing any document or webpage against specific frameworks. “Increasingly, businesses are expected to adhere to dozens—sometimes hundreds—of standards. It’s too much for anyone to keep up.”
Back in 2022, Sydell and I teamed up to cowrite about AI in another useful context: sourcing the optimal personnel for tomorrow’s organizations. Together we published Decoding Talent: How AI and Big Data Can Solve Your Company’s People Puzzle (Fast Company Press). Recently, Sydell sat down with me to talk about how artificial intelligence can streamline the many hoops that companies must jump through just to keep their heads above water.
“The ISO 27001 cybersecurity standard alone is super complex,” said Sydell. “Yet even that is just one framework—among many. Countless others exist at the state, federal, even city level.” (New York City, for instance, has its own AI-related legislation. As Professor John Hausknech of Cornell University’s ILR School explains, “The first of its kind in the nation, the law mandates testing by independent auditors of AI tools in order to screen for potential biases based on race/ethnicity and sex. Employers will be required to post on their websites use of AI tools for hiring and promotion decisions, and results of an independent bias audit on the tools within the previous 12 months.”
And we haven’t even discussed increasing global requirements. Thousands of new international laws are emerging to govern AI usage—enough to make even the most organized left-brain compliance officer’s head swim. Or melt, as the case may be.
Vero AI’s singular promise is to airlift businesses out of a Kafkaesque mire of endless regulation. It does so by siccing AI on bureaucratic complexities to boggle the mind and test one’s soul—and patience.
“Imagine uploading a folder full of PDFs, Word docs, screenshots—even URLs. With a single click, Vero AI ingests the content and analyzes it through the lens of the compliance framework of your choice. ISO 27001? Check. CCPA? Check. Emerging EU legislation on AI? Also check.”
It’s easy to see why AI is the logical choice to manage and respond to bureaucratic requirements. By its nature, artificial intelligence can perceive patterns no human would ever glean. NYU Langone Health reports that AI can detect lung cancer with a 97 percent accuracy, far eclipsing top human pathologists. “Even more remarkable, the system has taught itself to identify specific genetic mutations associated with lung cancer by analyzing pathology images alone—a process that ordinarily relies on expensive genetic tests and can take weeks.” With AI, the process is instant.
Beyond analyzing troves of data to sift through requirements even the most diligent person might miss, AI can proactively respond to requests with lightning speed—a superhuman ability that might have saved Josef K from the state. (Or not since Kafka’s book is meant to be an allegorical warning.) Again, companies like Vero AI can serve as attack dogs on the behalf of burdened businesses, fetching required documentation and responding to numerous requests simultaneously. Not mindlessly like some automaton either, but with foresight and intention.
“Just as the early Internet evolved from static pages to dynamic experiences, Vero reimagines compliance as a continuous, intelligent system,” says Sydell. “While you’re in board meetings with staff, it’s busy keeping tabs on legislative developments, both domestically and internationally. It’s also comparing your organization against all relevant standards 24/7 to see how well you’re stacking up. It’s even analyzing emerging laws—ones that haven’t passed—to model how they might affect your future compliance requirements.”
Learning of such proactivity reminds me of how cutting-edge cybersecurity firms now use AI to go on the offensive against criminals. Companies like Pentera are leading the way in this regard, proactively sniffing out threats and responding before they ever become an issue. As Silo City Information Technology explains, “By running continuously, Pentera provides an up-to-date view of an organization’s security posture, allowing for rapid identification and remediation of new vulnerabilities.”
Returning to The Trial, Josef K. never discovers his accusers or his alleged crime. All his attempts to understand his dilemma and fix it are useless. The machine swallows him whole. A grim portrait of a man defeated by confusion; it needn’t be our businesses’ fate. Not in the 21st century. Instead, we can turn the machine on the machine. And then? Get back to work.
