OneTrust Exec on Agentic AI Solutions for Privacy Teams

OneTrust today announced new AI capabilities within its data privacy automation platform. Channel Insider spoke with Ryan Edge, director of strategy at OneTrust, to learn more about the latest solutions and why the company is so bullish on agentic AI in privacy.

New Copilot capabilities, automated workflows, and agentic solutions join the platform

The new solutions aim to simplify and automate various tasks across research, assessments, and responses that privacy teams currently perform manually. Edge states that these new tools were designed to address workflows that often leave short-staffed privacy teams without the resources to execute, while also fulfilling more strategic objectives for organizations worldwide.

The OneTrust Copilot now provides privacy teams with easy access to the exact regulatory, product, and program intelligence they need to stay current. The tool references sources such as OneTrust DataGuidance, the myOneTrust knowledge base, and OneTrust tenant data. The Copilot, utilizing these resources, provides trusted regulatory information, insights into program effectiveness, and guidance on enabling or configuring new capabilities within the platform.

“The Copilot will dynamically understand what it you’re looking for and will quickly find and present that information,” Edge said. “It isn’t giving recommendations or prompting any action, it’s simply reducing the time it takes to find necessary information across sources within the platform.”

The two AI agents now available within the OneTrust platform are:

• Privacy Breach Response Agent: analyzes data breaches and generates the guidance and tasks necessary to meet notification windows. By automating this process, teams reduce the time needed to implement privacy protocols and decrease manual workloads on internal teams.
• Privacy Risk Assessment Agent: automates the assessment process and flags risks for the privacy team to address.

The announcement also includes new AI Document Scanning and AI Inventory Analysis workflows, which auto-populate assessments by scanning documents, past assessments, and existing inventories to identify relevant information and pre-populate new assessments.

“When we look at how we innovate within the platform, we always ask what are the biggest challenges our customers have, and how can we automate them,” Edge said.

All AI tooling pulls from data that customers already share with OneTrust

Edge emphasized that the new AI-based capabilities are trained on OneTrust’s own information and only the data that teams input into the platform, allowing the AI tools to reference this data for use.

“Privacy teams are often the strongest line of defense telling their organizations to use AI responsibly, so they absolutely will be selective in how they utilize it themselves,” Edge said. “We already have a head start here, in that users already trust us with the data they input and already use our platform to action their data to automate requests.”

The solutions, when viewed together as a bundle, also offer teams a journey through AI adoption. The Copilot is the simplest, in some ways, form of AI to begin with for users still unfamiliar with tooling; ultimately ending up at agentic AI signifies a progression through the technology.

Why OneTrust sees agentic AI as the future for effective privacy teams

Edge told Channel Insider that he and the OneTrust team view agentic AI not just as an essential tool, but as crucial to the future of data professionals and their work.

“Human context is always going to be required in our industry. AI is great at augmenting teams, but it will never replace them,” Edge said. “That said, we absolutely think the future of privacy is agentic.”

Edge highlights that many teams focused on data privacy work within organizations find themselves understaffed and increasingly tasked with more work at higher stakes. He says they can’t keep up, and agentic and other forms of AI can fill gaps on repetitive and relatively mundane tasks to free up experts for more strategic initiatives.

“Privacy experts and teams are being asked to lead strategic planning and weigh in on long-term business strategy, but they don’t have time to dedicate to those projects while they’re also doing all the other stuff manually,” Edge said. “We want to automate those other tasks so they can do the strategic work that’s being asked of them.”

OneTrust isn’t the only vendor adding AI agents to its tech offerings. Catch up on the latest agentic AI news from companies like Google Cloud and NVIDIA.