Automated policy checks are essential for modern CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to deliver software faster with greater reliability and confidence while ensuring security, compliance, and quality. By automating manual reviews and enforcing security protocols reliably, these checks streamline pipelines, reduce risk, and increase efficiency. Centralizing policy enforcement at the artifact management layer provides a more holistic approach, addressing challenges such as regulatory compliance, dependency scanning, code quality gates, infrastructure as code validation, container security, and deployment policies. Implementing automated policy checks requires selecting the right tools, defining clear policies, integrating early, and monitoring and iterating to refine policies and improve tools regularly.