“God seems to know not only what we do but also what we think. Seems like a huge data privacy concern.”  

With the above statement in the latest Netflix/BBC special Cunk on Life, it appears that data privacy has seeped into the mainstream consciousness. The legal frameworks have evolved enough that privacy professionals can ascertain how to stay on the right side of data privacy laws without impeding their firms’ legitimate business objectives. The question though in the world of rapidly advancing AI is if we have the necessary technical capabilities to administer data governance, privacy and security (Data GPS) at scale, how might our industry evolve to meet existing and emerging customer requirements? What might the impact of AI be? 

Here are my top predictions on secular trends around data and its GPS. If you accuse me of putting some of my wishes as predictions, I won’t deny it. 

Important vs. Urgent

Data governance, privacy and security (Data GPS) have been a nice initiative for a long time. Organizations dealing in trust seem to care for it while others have tended to pay lip service. With the continued mainstreaming of data privacy concerns, nearly all consumer-facing organizations will be forced to treat data GPS as a first-class initiative within their businesses. I am already seeing signs of this across financial services, retail, and healthcare organizations.  

Legal and Security Teams Will Become More Demanding

The days of legal and security teams being given an excuse for the technical infeasibility of data GPS are numbered. Everyone, including the Luddite lawyers, is seeing magic happen in front of their eyes with consumer AI tech. In this magical world, it’s hard to convince them that data GPS is still tied to a 20-year-old legacy technology. 

Built-in vs. Bolt-on Data GPS

Driven by the above, new data architectures within companies will have built-in Data GPS. Collection, processing, storing, access and distribution of sensitive data will leverage technologies like tokenization, redaction and masking to minimize risk. 

Enterprise Search Drives Data GPS Urgency

AI tools powering enterprise search will likely unlock an unparalleled productivity boost. However what is certain is that enterprise search tools like Microsoft Copilot, Glean and Perplexity will continue driving urgency for a buttoned-up data governance platform. That is unless you want every employee within your organization to have access to everyone else’s salary data or other need-to-know information. 

Enterprise AI forces Unstructured Data Into the Conversation

For the last decade, the industry has been focused on just structured data management (data cataloging, BI tools). Unstructured data was considered too onerous, and too expensive. Unfortunately, this has led to most data leaks and exposures happening on unstructured data repositories (file shares, S3 buckets). 

AI devours unstructured data and has an insatiable appetite for it. The business teams will continue to push for access to unstructured data repositories to make their AI tools better. The legal and security teams will demand better GPS. Ironically, AI itself might provide the answer in the form of Data GPS platforms powered by advanced AI models capable of parsing through tables, text, images, voice and video. 

Data – Use it or Snooze it

The security and legal teams are increasingly concluding that less data is the best way to minimize their risk radius, be it the risk of breaches or the risk of court-mandated discovery. However, the business teams will keep pushing to keep all data forever as data can instantly become even more valuable in the age of AI (training, inference, validation). 

Data GPS platforms will be asked to solve both of the above challenges simultaneously. While I expect this trend to become more prominent in 2025, the right solutions for this problem may take multiple years to emerge. 

Tool Consolidation

Budgets will continue to be tight and tight budgets drive consolidation. Vendors solving just one piece of the puzzle (like providing data privacy workflows) will continue to be hammered to do more or be replaced by modern platforms providing a unified data GPS capability stack. 

Enterprise Users Will Expect More

Enterprise users, having seen the power of consumer AI, will keep demanding more from their data GPS tools. Vendors with legacy architectures, having done AI-washing until now, will get called out with examples of what modern data GPS platforms can do.  

E.g. Many organizations would like to simply classify their documents (legal, tax, earnings, patents, etc.) and label them appropriately (sensitive, confidential, public). Old legacy architectures may find it impossible to do this using their archaic pattern matching and regular expression approaches. A modern data GPS platform can virtually do this instantly at scale, and can even learn about new document types with some human-reinforced learning.  

Vendor Consolidation

In 2024 we already saw a few DSPM (data security posture mgmt.) vendors getting acquired. Tool consolidation and increased user expectations will continue driving vendor consolidation in the market. 

Automate or Get Automated

A final word for all of us working across different industries. 2025 is the year of transition. Transition to a world where we leverage AI to automate many of our tasks and become more productive. We can be at the forefront of increasing the overall pie and helping the collective human spirit explore wider frontiers.  

If semiconductors and software were the gifts from the late 20th and early 21st century, AI and Automation appear to be the driving forces for the mid-21st century. What an exciting era!