For a decade, the most valuable American software companies automated the things businesses wanted to do: sell, ship, hire, close the books. Norm AI, the New York company that this week raised $120 million at a $1.2 billion valuation, is built on a stranger and possibly larger premise — that the most expensive part of running a modern enterprise is the things it is not allowed to do, and that the rulebook governing them can, at last, be run as software. Compliance has always been a tax on ambition. Every bank, insurer, drugmaker, and public company employs armies of people whose job is to read regulation, interpret it, and stand between the business and a catastrophic mistake. It is slow, expensive, and — because it depends on human attention — quietly unreliable. Norm AI’s proposition is that a new class of AI agent can read the regulation, reason about a specific...