As artificial intelligence and digital services become increasingly integrated into public administration, industry and essential services, organisations across Europe face a parallel challenge: keeping pace with an increasingly complex regulatory environment.
The AICONFORM project – Agentic Framework for Automated Regulatory Compliance – has officially begun its 24-month journey to address this challenge. Launched on 1 June 2026 under the Digital Europe Programme, AICONFORM is developing a new approach to making regulatory compliance more practical, automated and trustworthy.
Rather than treating compliance as a largely manual process of interpreting legislation, preparing documentation and repeatedly checking whether requirements have changed, AICONFORM aims to transform regulatory obligations into information that digital systems can understand, process and monitor.
Why Automated Regulatory Compliance Matters
European organisations operate within a fast-evolving regulatory landscape that includes frameworks such as the EU AI Act, NIS2, eIDAS 2.0 and GDPR. Regulatory obligations are often distributed across different sources, written in complex legal language and updated over time, increasing the workload for public authorities, SMEs and regulated industries.
For organisations deploying AI systems and digital services, compliance is therefore not simply a one-time exercise. Requirements need to be identified, understood, documented and monitored while organisations also need to respond as legislation, technologies and operational conditions evolve.
AICONFORM responds to this need by developing a modular and interoperable framework for automated regulatory compliance, designed to help organisations translate complex regulatory requirements into practical and auditable workflows.
From Complex Regulation to Operational Compliance
At the heart of AICONFORM is the ambition to make regulation increasingly machine-readable and actionable.
The project combines AI and Natural Language Processing, legal knowledge graphs, executable compliance rules, privacy-preserving technologies and qualified digital trust services. Together, these components will support activities ranging from extracting regulatory obligations and classifying risks to generating compliance evidence, maintaining audit trails and assisting with conformity assessment.
AICONFORM will also integrate digital trust mechanisms such as qualified electronic signatures, e-seals, timestamping and European Digital Identity Wallet workflows, while supporting privacy-preserving approaches to compliance data.
Importantly, automation does not mean removing human responsibility from compliance decisions. AICONFORM is designed around principles including human oversight, traceability, transparency, privacy and auditability, supporting organisations in using AI-enabled tools while maintaining accountable decision-making.
What Does AICONFORM Aim to Achieve?
AICONFORM brings together technical development, real-world validation and stakeholder engagement with one central mission: to make regulatory compliance more actionable, transparent and scalable.
The project aims to:
- Extract and formalise regulatory obligations from EU and sectoral legislation, transforming them into machine-readable and machine-executable rules using AI/NLP technologies.
- Develop a compliance knowledge graph and rule engine capable of structuring, connecting and operationalising regulatory requirements.
- Support conformity assessment and compliance documentation through AI-enabled reasoning, explainable outputs, structured templates and human oversight.
- Enable secure and privacy-preserving reporting through advanced data governance mechanisms and digital trust services.
- Validate the AICONFORM framework in real operational environments across public administration, manufacturing and energy.
- Deliver reusable and open-source resources, including APIs, SDKs, compliance templates and conformance materials for wider adoption.
- Support continuous compliance monitoring, allowing rules and workflows to respond to regulatory and operational changes.
- Build capacity among professionals and stakeholders through training, e-learning, workshops and policy engagement.
Together, these objectives connect technological innovation with a wider European priority: enabling organisations to adopt AI and digital technologies while maintaining compliance, accountability and trust.
Testing AICONFORM in Real-World Environments
A key part of AICONFORM will be moving beyond theoretical compliance models and testing the framework under real operational conditions.
The project will be validated across three main environments: public administration, manufacturing and energy. These pilots will explore how a common compliance framework can respond to different sectoral requirements while preserving principles such as interoperability, privacy, auditability and human oversight.
In public administration, AICONFORM will explore how AI-enabled tools can support regulatory screening, risk identification and compliance reporting. In manufacturing, the project will examine compliance processes connected to AI-enabled production, quality assurance and workforce-related workflows. In the energy sector, the framework will support privacy-preserving compliance processes related to digital services and regulatory obligations such as GDPR, NIS2 and eIDAS 2.0.
This real-world validation will help the consortium assess the framework in practical settings and understand how its components can be adapted and replicated across different sectors.
Measuring the Project’s Impact
AICONFORM has established concrete targets to evaluate its progress and impact.
By the end of the project, AICONFORM aims to achieve at least a 30% reduction in compliance reporting time, at least 95% reporting accuracy and at least five machine-readable compliance templates per pilot. The project will also develop reusable open-source tools and support capacity building by training at least 200 professionals.
Beyond these measurable results, the project seeks to contribute to a broader shift in how regulatory compliance is approached across Europe.
By reducing reliance on fragmented and highly manual processes, AICONFORM aims to help organisations dedicate more resources to innovation and service delivery while strengthening transparency, legal certainty and trust in AI-enabled systems.
European Expertise Working Towards a Common Goal
Delivering this vision requires expertise extending far beyond AI development alone.
Coordinated by the Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance, the AICONFORM consortium brings together expertise spanning public administration, AI and software engineering, semantic technologies, data protection, qualified trust services, interoperability, industrial and energy pilots, training, exploitation and communication.
This multidisciplinary collaboration is central to AICONFORM’s approach. Regulatory compliance is not only a technological challenge; it also involves legal interpretation, organisational processes, data governance, trust, interoperability and the people ultimately responsible for putting regulatory requirements into practice.
By bringing these perspectives together, AICONFORM aims to develop solutions that are both technically advanced and grounded in real operational needs.
The AICONFORM Journey Begins
On 16 June 2026, the AICONFORM consortium came together in Athens, Greece, for the project’s official Kick-off Meeting, hosted by the Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance.
The meeting brought partners together to align on the project’s objectives, implementation approach and upcoming activities, establishing a common foundation for the work ahead.
From the development of the first technical components to pilot validation, training activities, policy engagement and the release of reusable compliance resources, the coming months will gradually turn the AICONFORM vision into practical results.
Follow the AICONFORM Journey
The AICONFORM project has now entered its implementation phase, beginning a two-year journey towards making regulatory compliance more automated, interoperable, transparent and trustworthy.
As the project progresses, the AICONFORM website will share updates on project activities, pilots, events, publications, training opportunities, technical developments and new tools and resources.
Explore the AICONFORM objectives, discover the project use cases and meet the AICONFORM consortium to learn more about the people, technologies and activities behind the project.
Stay connected and follow AICONFORM as we work towards a more practical approach to automated regulatory compliance and trustworthy AI in Europe.