It is a familiar story across enterprises today. A business unit started piloting a new artificial intelligence tool in January, but come May the project is still stuck in a security review. The CFO is asking for results, but the broader rollout is blocked. The security team has valid questions about data retention and model training, demanding compliance evidence from a thirty-day-old startup.
This friction between business units and security teams over AI adoption is real, and it stems from two very different but equally valid perspectives.
Business teams are being pushed by their CEO to adopt AI to drive productivity and innovation. They are keen, and have identified an immediate value in adopting new AI applications or agentic workflows to streamline operations. When a rollout is stalled by a four-month vendor assessment, they are frustrated and complain that security processes are too slow.
Of course, if you are on the security team, you are not trying to block innovation. You are likely struggling under a backlog of onerous reviews, not able to say yes to the business requests because traditional security controls and processes were not built for AI. Your tools are no help; You cannot reliably see or control the data flowing into an application, and you are struggling even to get access to a robust data retention policy from the vendor. You are as frustrated by the endless reviews as your business partners.
You should not have to choose between blocking innovation and eroding your data protection. Netskope One AI Security provides a unified approach to AI security, and security review cycles for AI tools are just one of the things we can fix.
Here is how we help organizations break the security review bottleneck.
• Remove the burden of manual vendor evaluations
Security teams can skip the endless questionnaires because the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index provides real-time risk scoring for more than 85,000 cloud, SaaS and AI applications. Instead of pushing startups for compliance paperwork they might not have yet, your security team can instantly see how an application handles enterprise data, whether it trains on user inputs, and what its overall risk profile looks like. This allows teams to make fast and informed decisions.
• Apply semantic data protection
Traditional data loss prevention fails when AI transforms content. Netskope One AI Guardrails and our advanced data loss prevention (DLP) solve this by inspecting every prompt and response, including the attachments going in and the semantic meaning of the response coming out. We prevent personally identifiable information, source code, and intellectual property from ever reaching the AI tool in the first place. If sensitive data never leaves your environment, concerns about vendor data retention become much easier to manage.
• Secure autonomous agents
Internal teams are increasingly deploying autonomous AI agents that execute tasks and manage workflows. These agents often use APIs and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect to external tools and databases. For applications supporting MCP the Netskope One Agentic Broker unifies visibility, inventory, risk assessment, and integrated policy to secure your MCP landscape, while Netskope One AI Gateway secures the AI powered-apps you’re building privately – centralizing authentication, rate limiting, and content inspection for this machine-to-machine traffic. This ensures your agents operate with least-privilege access and remain protected from malicious tool poisoning.
• Eliminate the latency tax
Your business doesn’t just need AI tools to be provisioned faster, this need for speed continues into usage. Introducing a slow inline data security layer can frustrate users and counter-productively drive them to unsecured shadow AI. Netskope eliminates the speed dilemma through NewEdge AI Fast Path. By using a globally distributed private cloud with extensive direct peering to top AI destinations, we optimize network paths and minimize response times.
Netskope empowers IT teams to roll out new AI capabilities quickly while giving security teams the visibility and runtime protection they demand. To learn more about how we can help you streamline your AI rollouts, explore the Netskope One AI Security platform today.
