With artificial intelligence (AI) now used in many of the apps that drive the digital workplace, and many enterprise managers are beginning to question the implications this will have for privacy.

Speed, scale and automation are the key reasons why AI has become attractive for businesses and customers. The quantity of data that AI can provide is bigger than what human analysts are capable of, and ultimately, this will be the only way to process big data in a reasonable time frame.

So, what role will AI play in privacy and what areas where we will see AI taking a central role in privacy and data governance, both now, and in the future:

Privacy Concierge: Bots can recognize, route and service privacy data requests faster and more cheaply than humans, in much the same way that other bots handle increasingly complex requests today.

Data Classification: AI has already shown itself to be highly effective at identifying and classifying data that could take a human operator significant time and effort to review. This means that much of the existing data businesses hold that could fall within privacy regulations (and therefore need to be available to consumers on request).

Managing Sensitive Data: AI can also provide a role in handling sensitive data itself. Specifically, tasks in which sensitive data might be exposed to a human operator unnecessarily. For example, routing requests for healthcare records between providers in which there is a need to aggregate data but a desire to provide an additional layer of privacy. AIs are extremely effective at consuming and analyzing data yet are essentially impervious to the implications of the information they see. It’s simply not possible to bribe an AI into leaking a celebrity’s healthcare records, as an obvious example.

Identifying Personal Data and Processes

Before you do anything, you need to have some sort of a “data processing map.” This is drawn by responding to several questions such as:

1. What privacy related data do you have?
2. Where is it in the system?
3. What processes rely on it?
4. Who are the owners of systems and processes where personal data resides?

There are privacy resources such as Cisco’s Data Privacy’s Maps that can help identify the routes for data and what processes must be in place to ensure data’s protection, and privacy. Such mapping remains the first step to protecting data, knowing what you have, and where it is.

To enable AI to be a powerful asset within your enterprise, explore how to ingest more data to expedite this process using LogZilla’s Network Event Orchestrator and be empowered to do more with your data and privacy compliance.

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