Anish Acharya's claim that AI regulation is 'overdiscussed' is Silicon Valley code for 'we'd prefer you stopped asking awkward questions.' But here's what matters to a mid-market UK legal practice, insurer or accountancy firm: the FCA Consumer Duty PS22/9, the SRA Code, PRA SS1/23 and the incoming EU AI Act classification of high-risk systems do not go away because San Francisco thinks they're tedious. UK regulators are already taking action. The ICO has given firms six months to demonstrate AI governance under UK GDPR. The FRC's ISA UK audit standards now explicitly require auditors to address AI in their risk assessments. This is not overdiscussed. This is happening. For regulated firms, ignoring this debate is operational and reputational risk.
What Acharya's comment reveals is a widening gap between startup speed culture and regulated industry reality. The venture capital narrative has always been: move fast, break things, litigate later if needed. But UK law firms, insurance brokers, wealth managers and accountancy practices operate under different rules. They have clients, they have regulators, they have professional indemnity insurance that will not cover AI failures caused by negligence or non-compliance. The pattern emerging is clear: Silicon Valley wants to pursue AI without friction; the regulated sectors in which Trovix operates are being forced to choose between competitive pressure to adopt AI and the actual legal obligation to do so responsibly. That tension is real. It is not overdiscussed — it is underresolved.
The honest truth is this: most enterprise AI products in legal, insurance and financial services have been built for speed, not for governance. Harvey, Legora, Luminance and mainstream tools like Microsoft Copilot are genuinely powerful for pattern-matching and drafting. But they were not designed with the FCA's model risk governance framework or PRA SS1/23's third-party model risk management in mind. They do not natively track audit trails for SRA-regulated file management. They do not embed the kind of compliance documentation that a financial crime investigator or professional indemnity auditor will demand to see. This is not a limitation of the tools themselves — it is a gap between when they were built and what UK regulation now requires. Trovix Audit was built precisely for this gap: to create governance and compliance visibility on top of whatever AI systems a firm deploys. Without it, or something equivalent, firms are running blind.
The practical move for a mid-market firm right now is not to wait for regulation and innovation to converge — they won't, fast enough. Instead: audit what AI you are actually using. Document it. Understand the model risk, the data lineage, the bias potential and the output accuracy for your specific use cases. Use Trovix Watch to track regulatory changes as they land — the EU AI Act's Article 10 requirements for training data documentation are already crystallizing. Then make deliberate choices about what you deploy, where and why. The firms that will win the next three years are not those pretending regulation does not exist. They are those treating AI governance as competitive advantage, not overhead.
Source: CNBC