Can AI Help Your Organization Achieve Its IG Goals?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of software to “learn” and make decisions based on inputs and conditions. This creates intelligent computers that can reason on a fundamental level like humans, only much more rapidly and efficiently. The use of AI has drastically increased and is used for applications like robotics, complex classification, medical and maintenance diagnostics, advertising and pricing, and even compliance.

AI solutions, if pundits are to be believed, will solve everything from data storage to transportation. The use of AI to assist in Information Governance program tasks and activities is steadily rising.

Fostering GDPR Compliance

The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has left companies across the globe scrambling to gain control over the consumer data they have housed. Some software companies are offering AI tools to assist in this effort. One example is Informatica’s Compliance Data Lake, which uses machine learning technology to simplify compliance tasks. The software aims to give enterprises a holistic, comprehensive view of consumer data, regardless of where it is stored. It uses machine learning to identify relationships among data in different databases and data stores, including email, instant messages, social media, transactional data and other sources.

The goal is to ensure compliance with GDPR by gathering technical, business, operational and usage metadata, and providing more accurate compliance analytics and reporting.

Auto-classification and File Remediation

AI is also being applied to large collections of unstructured information. Unstructured information lacks detailed metadata and must be classified and mapped to an organization’s information taxonomy so it can be managed. AI can be used to inspect the contents of e-documents and e-mails to make a “best guess” at how they should be categorized. Some of the more sophisticated file analysis classification and remediation (FACR) software can actually insert basic metadata tags to help organize content. This is an essential task for executing defensible disposition, that is, following an established records retention schedule (RRS) and dispositioning (usually destroying) information that has met its life cycle retention requirements.

E-discovery Collection and Review

AI is also used commonly to locate information that is responsive in a particular legal matter. Using predictive coding software, a human expert, usually an attorney working on a case, feeds the software examples of content (e.g. documents and emails) that are relevant. Then the software goes out into information stores and looks for similar content. It serves up the content and the expert reviewer goes through a sample and teaches the software “more like this” and “not like this” so the AI software gets better at narrowing its searches. After a few iterations, the software becomes quite efficient at finding the relevant information. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. Courts in the U.S. have ruled that if the predictive coding software locates 70% or more of the responsive information, then that is acceptable, since that is about the accuracy rate of humans, due to fatigue and error.

AI has proven to be a good tool for IG programs to utilize to accomplish key tasks, and the use of AI in IG programs will continue to grow.