A new report from Theta Lake has revealed that almost all organisations are adopting AI in their workplace communications, yet the vast majority are struggling to manage the associated compliance and governance risks.
The findings, published in the company’s seventh annual Digital Communications Governance Report, show that 99% of firms are expanding their use of AI in communications, while 88% admit facing significant governance and security challenges as they do so.
The report highlights the rise of what Theta Lake describes as “aiComms” – a new class of communications involving AI-generated content and interactions with AI participants. This trend is reshaping workplace communication and accelerating both the pace and complexity of compliance oversight. With enterprises increasingly using modern, multi-channel unified communication and collaboration (UCC) tools, the introduction of AI has created a new layer of risk behaviours and potential data protection issues.
According to the research, 47% of respondents said their greatest challenge is ensuring that AI-generated content is accurate and complies with regulatory standards. Beyond AI-specific issues, firms continue to face wider compliance difficulties, with most relying on multiple platforms and vendors to record, archive, and supervise communications – a setup Theta Lake warns is inefficient and leaves gaps in oversight.
The report found that 82% of firms use at least four communication platforms, with the average firm now using six UCC tools. On top of this, organisations rely on three or more vendors for archiving and supervision. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents said they struggle to reconstruct or replay conversations that span multiple tools during investigations or e-discovery, while 41% face challenges migrating on-premise recordings to secure cloud environments.
Employee use of off-channel communications remains a top concern, with 67% of firms citing it as a major regulatory risk. These findings underline the ongoing struggle to modernise compliance infrastructure and the growing pressure to implement cloud-based, AI-enabled governance solutions.
Theta Lake CEO and co-founder Devin Redmond said, “It is clear from this data that trying to build onto legacy DCGA technology implementations to address compliance for modern communication tools is not working for compliance teams. Firms are using UCC tools more than ever with communications that span multiple tools and include textual, voice, and visual content, while now increasingly including AI generated communications and agents.
“The current state of siloed, inflexible voice and eComms compliance solutions, repositories, and processes is too complex, overly expensive, and incompatible with the reconciliation, investigation, supervision, and surveillance required. The exponentially increasing volume and meshed nature of these communications that also now include AI participants and content requires a unified, AI and Cloud-native DCGA platform delivered with independently verified and certified trust.”
Theta Lake was recently recognised as the furthest in Vision in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA) Solutions, reinforcing its leadership position among 14 evaluated vendors.
Commenting on the broader market trend, Metrigy president and principal analyst Irwin Lazar said, “Preliminary results from our annual workplace collaboration and contact center security and compliance global study of more than 300 organizations shows that more than 65% of companies plan to increase their spending on security and compliance in an attempt to keep up with growing AI threats. More than 90% of organizations have established, or plan to establish, a dedicated security and compliance strategy for AI.”
The survey, which polled 500 senior IT, unified communications, and compliance leaders from financial services firms in the U.S. and U.K., underscores the growing urgency for firms to move toward unified, cloud-based Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA) systems capable of managing both traditional and AI-generated communications.
Download the report here.
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