AI Copyright Risk in Financial Services and the Limits of Legacy Licensing - with Roanie Levy of CCC

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Roanie Levy, licensing and legal advisor at CCC. CCC provides collective copyright licensing services for corporate and academic users of copyrighted materials. Acting as an agent for rights holders, primarily publishers, by arranging voluntary licenses for institutions and enabling compliant use of text-based works. Roanie joins us on today's episode to explain why AI is exposing financial institutions to copyright risk at a scale leaders have never had to govern. With every prompt, attachment and drag connection creating a potential unlicensed reproduction. She makes it clear that most firms' existing content licenses were never written for AI, leaving executives vulnerable to infringement claims and the kind of litigation and settlement exposure already reaching into the billions. Today's episode is sponsored by CCC. If you offer AI products or services into the enterprise, you need to find enterprise leaders with relevance. That means the right title at the right type of organization. And of course, readiness. Emerge attracts VP and higher ranking enterprise audiences who are already convinced that they need to move beyond traditional IT. To learn the exact strategies we use to help leading AI brands and startups connect with their ideal enterprise AI buyers, visit emerge.com/ad1.
That's emerj.com/ad1.
Now the conversation with Roanie.
Roanie, welcome back to Emerge AI in Business.

**Roanie Levy** (1:59)
I'm so happy to be back.

**Daniel Faggella** (2:00)
It's great to have you. We have quite a lot to die at stake today, and I'm very eager to pick your brain on a few things. And I want to start with something that's been doing the rounds for the better part of the year. We've been seeing survey after survey landing and kind of creating the same picture. We see about 70 percent of organizations having evidence that their employees are using generative AI in some way, shape or form. But only about 15 percent of those have a policy framework or something like that around generative AI. And thinking of regulated industries, I think this, it makes me feel uncomfortable. So having watched this from inside the licensing world for two decades, what makes it so hard for teams across a single business to even agree on how to work with published content today?

**Roanie Levy** (2:47)
That's a great, great question. And you're right, the surveys are out there, and there are lots of them are out there, and they all point to the same direction. So 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. And that's up from 72% in 2024 And that's from the McKinsey study, State of AI in 2025
64% of employees in financial services report using AI in their roles. And what's important to note for financial services is that that is the highest growth of any industry. So AI is out there and it's out there at scale. Now you say you look at the usage on one hand, and then when you look at what the world of content looks like, we know that professionals in financial services share work related information 6.7 times per week with 12 other people. And nearly half of that is information that is externally sourced, not their own information. Information they got from somewhere else that they share with other people. And 79% report using AI more than occasionally in their tasks. So when you combine that rapid adoption of AI and this high content circulation environment, you are creating a significant copyright exposure that most firms are not prepared for and are not addressing yet.

**Daniel Faggella** (4:14)
It sounds like a very realistic problem I think I heard someone say the other day that if four years ago, the question was employers asking employees, why are you using AI to do your work? And the question now is why are you not doing it? But they're not always thinking about what this could mean or what this could cause. So when you consult with senior leaders who say, oh, we have a policy, we have a policy, we're not worried. What is the question you ask back to them to test whether that policy is real or is even effective?

**Roanie Levy** (4:43)
Right. First of all, you have a policy, but have your employees been trained on that policy? And they've been trained on the policy, but do you know if they're complying with that policy, that they actually understand that policy? And that's actually where we see a big gap, right? The policy it's there, it's like a check mark. But that's not enough. The policy has to be well-communicated, it needs to be well-understood. And then you need to go to that even next level of ensuring that the policy is actually integrated into the workflows so that there is no friction between using AI and complying with the policy.