Episode 6
Compliance as Market Access - Kunal Chopra (CEO, Certivo) on Innovation in Compliance with Tom Fox
This episode centers on a single reframe that runs through the entire conversation: compliance isn't a back-office cost or a checkbox — it's market access. It's the gate that decides which markets a manufacturer is actually allowed to sell into, which customers it can ship to, and which revenue is genuinely available versus quietly at risk. Tom Fox, a compliance lawyer by background, calls it an insight he'd never heard articulated that way, and the discussion explores what changes once leaders adopt that lens.
Kunal opens with his background — two decades in tech across Big Tech (Amazon, Microsoft), high-growth startups (an early role at Groupon), and CEO roles at mid-market companies with manufacturing and supply chain components. That vantage point is where he kept seeing the same inefficiency: compliance repeatedly blocking deals, shipments, and market entry, not because the rules were impossible, but because the process was a manual scramble of spreadsheets, emails, supplier PDFs, and consultant fees.
From there the conversation works through several major themes:
The regulatory landscape is global and tightening. Any US manufacturer with a global supply chain is effectively selling into the EU, where enforcement is sharpening, fines are steeper, and deadlines (the Packaging & Packaging Waste Regulation, the Cyber Resilience Act) are landing soon. A US-only regulatory view is already obsolete.
The asymmetry / visibility gap. Boards and CEOs sense that revenue is at risk but can't see how much or where. Compliance work, meanwhile, gets pushed down to procurement, operations, and sustainability teams. The result is a deadline-driven fire drill repeated throughout the year.
The wrong people are in the room. Kunal argues compliance teams should be working backward from sales and marketing — the functions closest to actual market access and customer requirements — yet those teams are rarely looped in. Bridging that gap is a strategic opportunity for the CCO.
How Certivo's platform works. Start with where a company sells, map every applicable regulation across categories (quality, safety, trade, material, sustainability), ingest product/BOM data from ERP and PLM systems, then apply an AI intelligence layer that coordinates with suppliers, collects and reads documentation, extracts data, and maps it to the rules — automating roughly 80–90% of the work and escalating the rest to a human.
Deterministic AI and hallucinations. A key distinction: AI extracts data from messy, multi-language documents, but the compliance decision itself is made deterministically — a rule-based, side-by-side comparison. That's how Certivo avoids hallucinated rulings in a regulated environment.
Scenario planning and continuous monitoring. Because the data is centralized and real-time, teams can model "what if we lose this supplier" scenarios, swap in compliant alternatives, track rule changes automatically, and even prepare proactively for regulations that haven't taken effect yet.
The closing takeaway: stop running compliance as a series of point solutions and start treating it holistically as a revenue-driving, revenue-protecting function.