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Here’s a question that should keep you up at night: What if the reason your compliance program feels perpetually under-resourced isn’t a budget problem; it’s a demand problem you haven’t even begun to solve?

In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons discovered something counterintuitive about coal. It was expected that the volume of coal consumed would fall as its use became more efficient. However, as steam engine efficiency increased, coal consumption didn’t drop. It exploded. Why?

Increased efficiency unlocked unexpected applications, making the resource accessible to use cases that were previously cost-prohibitive. This paradox has repeated itself across every technological revolution since. Mainframes served hundreds of companies; PCs served millions. Cloud computing gave every nail salon access to software that once required a Fortune 500 IT budget.

Efficiency doesn’t reduce consumption; it democratizes it.

Think about compliant behavior as a resource your organization consumes. Every policy acknowledgment, every completed training, every properly documented decision, every vetted third party, every investigated report; they are all units of compliant behavior. And right now, producing each unit is expensive.

So, what do you do? You triage. You make resource allocation decisions that leave gaps you can’t afford to close: superficial contract reviews, skipping enhanced due diligence for low-tier vendors, avoiding training reinforcement, and surface-level investigations due to limited bandwidth. You ration compliant behavior because it’s too costly to produce at scale.

The Jevons paradox suggests a different future.

When you make compliant behavior more efficient to produce — through better processes, smarter workflows, technology, automation, AI-assisted tools, or simply removing friction — the economics flip.

Activities that never made sense suddenly become viable. The contract review you couldn’t justify? Now you can. The risk assessment you shortened? Now you can do it properly. The monitoring you wished you had? Now it’s within reach.

This is the controversial part: Most compliance leaders think about efficiency the wrong way. They’re asking, “How do we do the same work with fewer resources?” They should be asking, “What compliance work have we been unable to do that now becomes possible?”

The organizations that understand this will pull ahead. They won’t use efficiency gains to shrink their compliance footprint; they’ll use them to expand their compliance capacity. They’ll close gaps they’ve been living with for years. They’ll move from triage mode to proactive mode.

Every organization will soon have access to tools that make compliant behavior dramatically cheaper to produce, enabling small teams to achieve the thoroughness of Fortune 500 programs. The organizations that embrace the paradox — that see efficiency not as a cost-cutting play but as a capacity multiplier — will define the next era of corporate compliance.

The real question is: Will you be one of them?

CEP Magazine | March 2026

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