Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm and has been quickly integrated into our daily lives, but not without hesitation. But for a Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) or someone in a similar role, it’s your job to ensure that the promises of AI align with regulatory compliance and don’t become security and privacy concerns.

We’ve already seen AI’s many benefits, but it isn’t the cure for all data privacy requirements. However, it can enable CPOs to automate data rights management, surface potential regulatory risk, and thwart potential cyberattacks.

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Here are five ways in which CPOs can utilize AI to improve compliance and navigate the complexities of the technology from a CPO’s perspective:

Pinpointing Privacy Risk

Streamline Risk Identification with AI-Powered Assessments

Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA) can be the bane of a privacy professional’s existence. Assessments create manual work and waste time and resources documenting potential privacy risks. The manual processes create inefficiencies and can increase risk when it takes too long to identify new or changing risks across the organization.

That’s where AI can play a vital role. Leverage AI to pinpoint risk and dramatically reduce the potential for new risk, improving the efficiency and efficacy of your compliance efforts. Use solutions like BigID that streamline and automate the process of conducting PIAs and DPIAs, allowing CPOs to efficiently assess the privacy risks associated with new projects, products, or initiatives.

Connect the Data Dots with AI

Data Mapping is Key to Improved Regulatory Compliance

Many organizations sit on mountains of data, much of which is sensitive, personal, and highly regulated. However, without identity context, it’s impossible to identify what data belongs to what individual, which is a critical element of achieving compliance with regulatory requirements.

Data mapping has become pivotal to any privacy program, as sensitive data may be siloed, come from unstructured sources, live in legacy databases, or present other challenges that hinder effective data identification, mapping, and compliance management. The harsh reality is that most technologies can’t identify whether a file or record contains social security numbers (SSN), passport numbers, driver’s licenses, or residential addresses.

In the privacy landscape, mapping identities to sensitive data helps to connect the dots and ensures compliance with several privacy requirements. BigID’s identity-aware AI privacy and protection enable organizations to automate data privacy to drive policies, streamline breach responses, assess risk with assessments, and fulfill data rights requests and deletions.

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Accelerate Data Rights Management

Improve Privacy Operations to Unlock Efficiency

We’ve come a long way since GDPR went into effect. However, many organizations still struggle with the manual processes of managing DSARs and fulfilling various data privacy rights. And even though we’ve made strides in automation, the most challenging aspect of data rights management is identifying all users’ PI and PII spanning multiple data sources and environments. Use AI to automatically discover, classify, and connect data to specific user profiles to automate DSARs, validate data deletion, and generate customized compliance reports.

For CPOs, solutions like BigID enable them to automate and customize features to manage data rights requests and privacy preferences, including request type, deletion workflows, regulation timelines, and remediation— ensuring the entire request lifecycle aligns with the legal requirements necessary to achieve compliance.

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The Hidden Risk in Unstructured Data

Harnessing AI for LLMs

80% to 90% of data generated is unstructured, which is already a mind-blowing amount of unstructured data. Historically, analyzing unstructured data has been quite challenging, but with GenAI & Large Language Models (LLM) introducing new levels of risk, classifying, managing, and securing unstructured data to ensure GenAI doesn’t have access to confidential, personal, regulated, or sensitive data is critical.

With growing AI legislation, leveraging a solution like BigID to automatically scan, classify, and accurately validate that the data in an LLM is fit for purpose (meaning there’s no unapproved sensitive, regulated, secrets, or critical data in there) will reduce the likelihood of data breaches, data leaks, and compliance violations.

CPOS must align with their security teams because AI security risks also bring privacy risks. Your privacy and security teams must work in tandem to adopt AI safely and responsibly.

Monitor & Report On Compliance

Automate Compliance Reporting To Quickly Remediate Risk

Regardless of where data lives—in the cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments—or what type it is, organizations need a consistent and automated way to classify, tag, and enforce policies on data based on sensitivity, risk, location, and more. They must also set policies around data movement and compliance to monitor data transfer, misuse, and policy violations.

BigIDs advanced AI and machine learning for comprehensive data discovery at scale— both in the cloud and on-prem provides context to data, enabling organizations to continuously update and improve the policy to adapt to evolving business needs and regulations.

BigID helps to reduce policy-based risk with data remediation workflows that help to manage and take action on risk according to business policy, along with audit trails and reporting to integrate into custom risk assessments.

AI-powered reporting tools like BigID can also generate customized compliance reports, reducing the time and effort required for manual data collection and analysis. By streamlining compliance processes, organizations can save time and resources. Any well-implemented policy enhances operational efficiency and improves compliance.

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How to Adopt AI Into Your Privacy Strategy

As AI revolutionizes organizations’ operations, CPOs have a unique opportunity to leverage AI technologies to enhance compliance efforts and strengthen data protection practices. By embracing AI-powered solutions for data privacy assessments, compliance monitoring, and security enhancement, CPOs can effectively navigate the complexities of regulatory compliance while mitigating risks and safeguarding individuals’ privacy rights.

Leverage solutions like BigID that take a privacy-by-design approach to automating manual processes, improving accuracy and actionability, and applying AI & ML to cut through the noise, improve risk management, enable a robust data privacy strategy, and achieve compliance.

Would you like to learn more about how CPO can leverage AI —book a 1:1 demo with our privacy experts today.