How technology helps with corporate ethics — Serhii Melnyk

How Technology Helps Manage Corporate Ethics: The Experience of Engineer Serhii Melnyk
Corporate scandals are increasingly becoming not only reputational setbacks but also direct threats to business stability. According to the EY Global Integrity Report, nearly half of employees at companies that experienced ethical incidents believe the crisis could have been prevented if leadership had responded to internal warning signals in time.

Preventing such crises before they emerge is the focus of Ukrainian engineer Serhii Melnyk, a recognized expert in AI-driven corporate ethics and compliance solutions. His work enables organizations to identify systemic violations long before they escalate into public scandals.

On December 4, 2025, this approach was recognized at the U.S. Capitol, where Melnyk received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from a Member of the U.S. Congress for exceptional contributions to entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, and economic development in the United States.

At a time when corporate misconduct increasingly erodes trust in business, Melnyk’s approach helps organizations shift from reactive damage control to systematic risk management. Corporate scandals remain one of the most significant reputational threats: according to the same EY report, 45% of employees cited insufficient leadership response to warning signals as the root cause of ethical incidents.

Most corporate ethics programs still operate under a reactive model: a scandal occurs first, followed by attempts to mitigate consequences. In an era of rapid information dissemination, this approach is no longer sufficient. For this reason, senior lead software engineer Serhii Melnyk has focused on building early-warning systems.

At the international company NAVEX, he designs AI systems that analyze employee reports and enable organizations to rapidly detect and prioritize emerging risk signals.

"If a company learns about a violation from the media, it is already a full-scale crisis. That is why it is critical for such signals to surface internally first and be addressed in a systematic manner," Melnyk emphasizes.

For internal reports to surface before issues become public, employees must be confident in anonymity, the absence of career risk, and the organization’s genuine readiness to act.
Melnyk’s system combines anonymous reporting with automated analysis. AI models track anomalous activity, including spikes in complaints and recurring patterns. Today, his solutions process more than 1.5 million ethics reports annually. According to the expert, security, and fault tolerance must be embedded into the architecture from the outset, and the system must not only record incidents but also proactively signal emerging risks.

Among his recent developments is an early-warning model based on trend analysis of reports by topic and region. It enables organizations to detect breakdowns in values or corporate culture at an early stage and prevent large-scale consequences.

Early identification of such patterns can significantly alter outcomes—particularly in situations affecting human safety and well-being. At NAVEX, Serhii Melnyk is responsible for products used by thousands of organizations across multiple countries, including approximately two-thirds of the highest-revenue companies on the Fortune list—an adoption level achieved by a limited number of specialists in this field.

He developed a similar approach in earlier projects, including the creation of AI systems for the gaming industry that analyzed the behavior of millions of users and flagged when gameplay patterns became harmful. In his current work, he applies this logic at scale: beyond analytics, his teams build digital assistants adapted to different countries, languages, and cultural norms, helping employees navigate complex or ambiguous situations.

"Ethics has long ceased to be a formality—it is a continuous process that must be supported daily, just like a security system," Melnyk notes.

The relevance of such technological solutions continues to grow amid increasing global pressure on business integrity principles. As the EY Global Integrity Report indicates, international circumstances increasingly force companies to balance rapid decision-making with adherence to ethical standards.