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AI BriefWire / Briefing
AI rollouts can be disrupted by the sudden exposure of forgotten data assets, which may pose security risks. Organizations need to carefully manage and audit their data before deploying AI systems. Proper data governance is essential to prevent costly delays and vulnerabilities.
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With AI, long-forgotten data assets suddenly turn to gold, with potential security risks.
Agentic and generative AI have opened up information and insights to professionals in enterprises. However, evidence suggests that trend could be too much of a good thing. At a recent conference, veterans of enterprise AI rollouts issued cautionary words to professionals considering diving headfirst into AI.
The issues these professionals encountered even led to temporary halts in AI rollouts meant to boost employee productivity, as executives reassessed information that could be exposed internally. At the same time, the executives, who spoke on a panel at the recent Veeam conference in New York City, emphasized that AI wasn't the source of the challenge. Both panelists' organizations had accumulated vast stores of data, and one required a new governance structure.
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Steve MacIntyre, senior vice president at Fidelity Investments, described how his 400,000-employee company saw data long tucked away in the recesses of its organization -- on SharePoint sites or in network-attached storage, for example -- suddenly surface via AI prompts. "It wasn't an AI problem," he said. "It was the productivity and the ability of AI to find things quickly."
Wim Geurden, chief architect for enterprise tech at EY, described his company's challenge as pinning down data ownership across its global network of independent affiliates -- data that was also surfacing through its AI engine. "When big enterprise search was launched, all kinds of stuff started to surface in places that people went," he said.
"EY Global doesn't own any of the data. Every member firm owns its data. That is where the first questions were raised. What's all this? How many SharePoint sites? We had multiple petabytes of data, and it was the Wild West. There was no lifecycle management on these SharePoint sites, and half of them had no owners. We didn't know when they were last accessed."