The rapid adoption of AI-powered UCC chat has introduced immense business value but has simultaneously created complex security and compliance challenges for organizations. The sheer volume and unique, persistent nature of modern chat and embedded AI features, make effective supervision a daunting task, especially under increasing regulatory scrutiny.
The complex challenges of supervising AI-powered chat
Chat compliance is challenging for several key reasons, which compounds the risk of misconduct and non-compliance:
- Enormous volume and variety: Some organizations are flooded with millions of chat messages, overwhelming the capacity of compliance and security teams. These messages are not just text; they include audio files, links, images, GIFs, emojis, and reactions, all of which must be captured and analyzed.
- Persistence and confidentiality: Because chat is persistent, files, links, and attachments remain accessible long after conversations have ended, regardless of how sensitive or confidential the information is, increasing the risk of data leakage.
- Shareable nature: Chat’s shareable nature makes it easy for confidential data to be sent internally and externally (whether files, links, or screenshots), increasing the risk of accidental or deliberate data sharing.
- Contextual gaps: Reconstructing fluid, ongoing conversations spanning multiple days and participants is difficult. Capturing the full context, including contextual details like emojis, reactions, edited/deleted messages, and original content shared via external links (OneDrive or SharePoint), is crucial for investigations but often incomplete, preventing compliance with regulatory obligations.
- Blurred Boundaries: The lines between work and home are increasingly blurred, with more chat being sent off hours. This increases the risk of inappropriate behavior extending beyond the sharing of illicit information.
These factors are added to the regulatory requirements, such as MiFID II and SEC 17a-4, that mandate the retention and swift access to electronic communications for regulatory supervision, legal investigations, and customer complaints.
In addition to these challenges, legacy archive systems and point solutions can’t keep up with the necessary technology to solve problems around complete data capture and reconciliation with a unified platform across capture, search and supervision. The lack of direct integrations with UCC vendors, and the lack of data completeness is going to cause issues for all other downstream legal and supervision use cases. Additionally, false positives will continue to be an issue without the ability to monitor the data due to rigid, custom-built detections and lack of transparency.
Essentials of chat compliance:
- Comprehensive capture: Ensuring there are no gaps in the record, all channels (group, private, in-meeting chat) and all content (emojis, GIFs, file attachments, edited/deleted messages, and shared files) are captured and analyzed.
- Automatic risk detection: Using purpose-built classifiers and compound detection infrastructure, these systems automatically detect security, data loss, and compliance risks in what’s spoken, typed, shown, or shared. This includes specific detections for collusion, misconduct, non-compliant content, sensitive data oversharing, and missing disclaimers.
- Prioritization and workflow: Communications and content requiring review or intervention are prioritized, with custom workflows routing potentially risky communications to relevant compliance supervisors within a dedicated review workspace that provides an audit trail.
- Swift remediation: Risky content can be swiftly remediated and removed across platforms, with comprehensive redaction capabilities to protect confidential or sensitive information from wider access.
- Legal hold and E-Discovery support: The systems offer rapid identification and consistent legal hold of relevant communications, content, and images across platforms to support investigations, regulatory reviews, audits, or complaints. This also includes instant search results to support e-discovery needs.
How Theta Lake solves for solid chat compliance
- Complete Data Capture and Reconciliation: We solve the fundamental data problem with complete capture and reconciliation across all AI-powered UCC platforms and modalities (chat, voice, video, and AI and more) through direct integrations. This gives customers visibility into reconciliation graphs, reports, API integration, global data routing, and health checks.
- Unified Search and Replay: The ability to easily search and replay voice, video, chat, AI and more, with unified conversation views and export options. Conversations often occur across platforms and modalities, from voice to text to chat. The ability to search and run legal processes as well as see conversations across all tools provides the necessary context around chats to provide a complete conversation picture.
- AI-Powered Risk Detection with Transparency: Our purpose-built, ISO-certified AI-powered risk detection capabilities enable safe and compliant collaboration, reducing the overall cost of compliance and risks of non-compliance. As the first AI-native vendor in Digital Communications Governance and Archiving (DCGA), we provide AI transparency and explainability features, purpose-built classifiers, an ensemble model, and the industry’s only compound detection infrastructure for increased precision and reduced false positives.
