Ready to take your privacy strategy to the next level? In an era marked by the growing use of AI in various tasks and jobs, organizations are discovering how AI can become one of their best allies, reducing complexity, accelerating compliance and optimizing all aspects of privacy management. This study demonstrates that AI-based solutions are improving and could soon become an asset in simplifying privacy-related activities, which are often time-consuming. It is therefore worth looking into these solutions today so as not to miss the boat.
To support our clients, we reviewed several AI-driven privacy solutions. This article gives an overview of features offered by key players in the Data Privacy market, including OneTrust, Smart Global Governance, Witik, Dastra, EQS, Secure Privacy, DataGrail, BigID, Collibra, Privacy License, and Ardent. This list is not exhaustive, but it highlights the major vendors we identified among our clients.
The radar below presents a summary of the study’s results, offering an overview of the capabilities of the various solutions regarding AI features. It will serve as a valuable tool for organizations to identify which solutions best align with their specific needs and priorities.
Figure 1: AI Privacy features Radar
AI Features for Data Privacy
During our benchmark, we identified five main kinds of features for AI use in Data Privacy solutions. The five categories cover the main recurring AI features found in editors’ solutions. While each category groups similar features, some unique AI features may fall outside these categories.
Figure 2: AI Privacy features Categories
1. Assisted generation of Privacy documents
AI solutions can automatically generate questionnaires and evaluations for compliance audits, satisfaction surveys, custom reports, and even data processing records. These tools allow for the customization of content according to specific requirements. Some solutions even integrate the possibility to import existing documents to optimize document generation.
Use case example: generating a template proposal of vendors assessment.
This kind of feature is now advanced and allows quick drafting of multiple documents that would otherwise take significantly longer.
Maturity score:
2. Intelligent document analysis & completion
Intelligent document analysis uses AI to review complex documents, extract key information, and identify compliance risks. It generates only initial draft responses to questions, helping users avoid starting from scratch. Human reviewers must verify the quality of these drafts.
Use case example: generating a first draft of a privacy by design on a new HR data processing.
This mature kind of feature now enables rapid drafting of responses in questionnaires or various documents, significantly reducing the time required for completion.
Maturity score:
3. AI-assisted compliance tasks & workflows
AI solutions can create compliance action plans, manage tasks, automate workflows, ensuring smooth execution of compliance processes. These tools optimize time and resources simplifying the completion of workflows.
Use case example: automation of data subject access request answers.
This kind of feature is emerging with the arrival of AI agents. In one year approximately, this technology will be more mature, allowing more accuracy and tasks combinations to simplify workflows.
Maturity score:
4. AI Support Assistants
AI conversational assistants provide real-time assistance to employees and customers by answering their questions and guiding them through compliance processes. In general, these AI assistants are pretrained with regulation referential or legal documents. They also can be adapted with client chosen documents uploaded in a safe work of environment provided by the editor. Their use enhances the accessibility and responsiveness of compliance services.
Use case example: Privacy-GPT enabling to answer questions such as “can you remind me of the data deletion rules for resumes?
This feature is readily available and can be easily implemented within companies using simple AI agent setups like Copilot.
Maturity score:
5. Cookie Management and Consent with AI
Possibility to use AI to automatically generate cookie consent banners, considering key inputs like language, country, and applicable regulations. It also automates the creation of privacy and cookie management policies, tailored to regional and linguistic legal criteria. Furthermore, some solutions include intelligent cookie classification, identifying, categorizing, and managing cookies on a website.
This feature is uncommon, and few editors have pursued its development
Maturity score:
How to make the most of current AI-tools maturity?
The benchmark indicates that AI-based privacy solutions provide notable benefits regarding compliance and workplace efficiency, though certain limitations remain to be addressed.
Benefits:
- Compliance and Timesaving: AI-based privacy solutions can improve and simplify
- AI features aim to save time, especially for repetitive and long tasks. This may involve, for instance, pre-completing questionnaires, workflow automation…
- AI tools provide access to a large knowledge base, either internally or externally, and enable faster searches. Compliance can be achieved more quickly and accurately.
- Those tools allow also to ensure consistency across the organization on how to tackle privacy topics (leveraging on a common RAG). Compliance will be more coherent within all the entities.
- Partial Automation: Full automation is not the goal in data privacy due to the sensitive nature of the information involved, making AI solutions more suitable as support tools rather than complete replacements. That’s why most of the editor are developing features for specific tasks integrating human oversight.
Limitations:
- Task-Specific Limitations: Many AI tools use third-party models (e.g. API directly linked to OpenAI) that may not be fully optimized for specialized tasks. When selecting an AI solution, check the model and training data, and opt for platforms that use proprietary models focused on Data Privacy for more reliable results.
- Security Risks: Increased connectivity and the demand for personalization may introduce security risks, potentially affecting data integrity and confidentiality. It is advisable to monitor how AI systems interact with your data to ensure that sensitive information is not accessible to the AI.
User responsibilities: It is important to recognize that using AI carries inherent risks, as its responses are not always accurate or relevant. Users should maintain a critical perspective and carefully verify any AI-generated content before incorporating it into official documents. Raising awareness and offering guidance on best practices for AI use could be beneficial to ensure responsible and effective implementation.
Outlook
Artificial intelligence is still in its infancy in privacy applications, and more advanced functions are likely to emerge in the future. Currently, AI capabilities are used as support tools for a variety of tasks, typically operating under human supervision to streamline time-consuming or repetitive processes. In one or two years, further opportunities could arise with the development of AI agents (systems designed to autonomously perform tasks for users or other systems), enabling more customization for specific business requirements or general applications, as well as better accuracy in performing specific tasks. For these reasons, it is advisable to take interest in AI tools right now as it can enable you to increase efficiency on operational topics.
Although greater personalization could enhance AI’s role in privacy and compliance, it also increases connectivity, which may pose security risks. Addressing these challenges will be necessary to maintain data integrity and confidentiality.
Finally, given AI’s rapid development, changing your current solution might not be financially wise. Nevertheless, plan for 2026 and reach out to your editor to learn about available features when AI agent technology will be mature.
As part of our research, we held one-hour workshops with six of these editors (Dastra, OneTrust, Smart Global Governance, Secure Privacy, Witik, and EQS/Privacy Cockpit) to better understand their AI capabilities, future developments, and how they integrate AI into their solutions.
We sincerely thank Cyprien Charlaté and Catherine Pigamo for their valuable contribution to the writing of this article.
