Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025.  Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

By Blake Brannon, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, OneTrust

While the M.O. used to be maximizing the collection and use of data, many companies are now shifting their strategies to responsibly collecting and using data. But managing data responsibly has never been more complicated or difficult. Organizations are up against:

• The expanding regulatory landscape, with new and evolving privacy and AI laws
• The acceleration of generative AI adoption and deployment, with growing pressure to show return on investment (ROI)
• Data sprawl-petabytes of data spread across the business without visibility into where it lives, what type of data it is, or how it's being used

These challenges have been a catalyst for change across privacy, risk, and compliance. In the next year and beyond, businesses will undergo organizational transformations, embrace new tools and technologies, and design future-proof processes that support the underlying goal of using data and AI responsibly.

With this in mind, here are a few of my predictions for 2025:

Compliance demands will unify teams across the business

The days of privacy, security, legal, and IT teams working in isolation are long gone. Today, due to several key catalysts, compliance must involve stakeholders from every corner of the business.

Businesses are no longer dealing with static regulations. As supervisory authorities and legislators across the world continually revise, expand, and refine legal frameworks to meet technological and societal demands, organizations are faced with a moving target. And it's not just privacy laws. The rise of AI and machine learning has led to a proliferation of new requirements, implicating everything from ethical AI use to data transparency.

It's a growing challenge to stay ahead of - or to simply just keep up with - an increasingly complex backdrop of legal frameworks. Fuelled by a rapid rise in AI usage and the need to maintain compliance with the world's 130+ privacy and data protection laws, organizations are designing integrated and cross-functional risk management strategies that allow them to navigate this dynamic landscape.

The way compliance is effectively operationalized in the business has also changed. Historically, compliance was a surface-level exercise executed mostly in legalese. It focused on the management of risk with minimal technical control implementations. Now, due to the advancement of technologies and their associated risks, achieving regulatory compliance requires an approach rooted in enforcement. Implementing active policies, continuous monitoring, and data controls that reach deeper into the operations of business could not be achieved without cross-functional collaboration.

AI agents will usher in a new age of scalable privacy and compliance

In 2025, specialist AI agents for privacy and compliance are poised to transform how organizations meet their regulatory obligations.

As AI technology advances, organizations are starting to deploy AI agents - intelligent software systems capable of autonomous actions and decision-making - across operational workflows. These AI agents can perform routine tasks and manage complex datasets, bringing a new level of efficiency and scalability to business processes.

Several converging factors are prompting organizations to adopt AI agents for privacy compliance. Privacy teams today navigate a complex regulatory landscape, where new digital regulations expand compliance responsibilities beyond traditional data protection laws. Adding to this complexity is the sheer volume of data generated daily - traditional compliance methods simply can't keep up with the scale and speed of today's data flows.

Specialized privacy-focused AI agents offer a powerful response to these challenges. With their ability to process large volumes of data, handle sensitive tasks, and automate compliance processes, privacy agents will be able to supplement human efforts and enhance operational efficiency. Organizations have long felt the need to automate more and rely less on manual processes to stay ahead of compliance demands. Over time, privacy agents will meet this need by autonomously tracking regulatory changes and implementing necessary policy adjustments in real time.

Privacy, compliance, and risk management teams will increasingly rely on dedicated privacy agents to extend their oversight as data processing demands grow. These agents autonomously interact with other operational AI systems, performing real-time compliance checks, validation, and monitoring as data flows through various touchpoints. By embedding directly into these systems, privacy agents help maintain regulatory alignment even as workflows accelerate, marking a pivotal shift in how AI augments human expertise to enhance business operations.

The symbiotic relationship between privacy agents and broader operational AI ecosystems will be foundational to responsible data and AI use. Privacy agents enable scalability, offering a level of automation and agility that can keep pace with complex regulatory requirements at scale and speed. This evolution will enable organizations to innovate more freely while supporting responsible, well-managed data practices.

Companies embrace data governance to drive AI ROI

The convergence of AI and data governance is becoming essential not only for ensuring data integrity and ethical AI use but also for maintaining compliance with evolving privacy regulations.

AI models often depend on vast datasets stored in data platforms, and many organizations are now facing the challenge of building robust data governance frameworks to manage them. With data governance becoming a foundational element for AI's success, organizations will begin to adopt a unified orchestration of purpose-based access policies to complement the privacy-first architectures found within these data platforms.

In response to these growing demands, data storage platforms are integrating more advanced intelligence and governance capabilities into their offerings. According to a recent report, Snowflake saw usage of every data governance feature increase by 70%-100% year-over-year between 2023 and 2024. This is reflecting a broader industry trend where organizations are turning to data platforms that offer not just storage and processing capabilities but also embedded governance features that simplify compliance and streamline data management.

Looking to the future, data governance teams will need to transition from simply providing access to data sources to creating reusable data products for internal stakeholders. By allowing AI and analytics teams to work more efficiently with high-quality, governed data, organizations can see a stronger ROI from their data initiatives.

The organizations that succeed in this space will be those that prioritize building scalable, automated governance frameworks that not only ensure compliance but also support the speed and performance required for AI workloads.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Blake Branon is Chief Product and Strategy Officer at OneTrust, overseeing all aspects of OneTrust’s strategy, product offerings, technology partnerships, and sales engineering teams responsible for defining the privacy, security, and governance market and OneTrust’s capabilities.