OneTrust Unveils New Data Governance Solution to Close the Enforcement Gap for AI-Ready Data

OneTrust’s Data Use Governance solution delivers industry-first capabilities designed to accelerate AI initiatives with automated data policy enforcement

OneTrust, the platform helping organizations use data and AI responsibly, announced its Data Use Governance solution—an industry-first set of capabilities designed to close the gap between traditional data governance and the real-time compliance demands of AI. As traditional data governance tooling becomes incompatible with the speed and scale required for AI innovation, Data Use Governance accelerates data enablement for AI initiatives with programmatic data policies, automated data controls, and embedded data policy enforcement.

“With OneTrust, data use governance is no longer a barrier — it’s an enabler.”

“The future of governance isn’t about restricting data, it’s about ensuring data is used responsibly, efficiently, and in alignment with data and AI innovation goals,” said Blake Brannon, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, OneTrust. “The biggest challenge for data governance teams has been enforcement, impossible to achieve without translating documented data policies into code. OneTrust now enables our customers to turn data policies, grounded in compliance, privacy, and consent requirements, into programmatic logic that automates enforcement at the level of the data query itself. With OneTrust, data use governance is no longer a barrier — it’s an enabler.”

Modern data governance requires a fundamental shift in approach. The rapid adoption of AI is transforming how organizations leverage data, but traditional governance — rigid, manual, and built for slow-moving environments — is failing to keep pace with the complexities and speed of modern data use. In today’s AI-driven data environment, this means increased compliance risks, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities for innovation. To harness the full potential of AI and analytics, organizations must move beyond outdated governance programs. A governance strategy that is policy-centric, programmatic, and project-initiated ensures that data is usable, compliant, and scalable in the AI era.

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With the OneTrust Data Use Governance solution, OneTrust meets the needs of this new era, enabling organizations to:

• Accelerate data use: Shorten approval cycles for data enablement with policies directly connected to embedded data controls, native to your data and AI systems.
• Enforce policies in real time: Automate policy enforcement at machine speed, ensuring compliance without slowing down AI and analytics initiatives.
• Ensure purpose-based policy adherence: Apply governance policies at project initiation and throughout project lifecycles, ensuring compliance without unnecessary enterprise-wide restrictions.

How Data Use Governance removes bottlenecks to achieve AI-ready data

OneTrust’s Data Use Governance solution helps organizations achieve AI-ready data and scale their data governance program for the speed and agility required for AI initiatives. It combines capabilities that empower organizations to:

• Organize data: Use AI-driven classification with both structured and unstructured data to capture four key areas of data context: business, regulatory, consent, and data, and store this context as machine-readable data labels, a required foundation for automating machine-enforceable data policies.
• Centralize policies: Transform documented privacy, consent, and regulatory policies into enforceable control code to manage data across its entire lifecycle—from data ingestion and usage to data sharing.
• Enforce controls: Connect data policies directly to real-time, native data controls in modern data and AI systems to shift from policy attestation to policy enforcement.
• Audit transparently: Audit the real-time application of the data controls and gain visibility into the application of column masking and row-filtering controls in order to achieve continuous governance.

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Enforcing data policies at machine speed

OneTrust’s newest innovation for Data Use Governance is Data Policy Enforcement, available now in private preview. The capability enables data governance teams to automate data policy enforcement and keep up with the velocity at which AI-driven systems process and utilize data.

AI doesn’t wait for manual approvals — it operates in real time, meaning that governance mechanisms must be just as fast and seamless. Some datasets are open access, requiring little to no oversight, while others, like personal data, must be governed with accuracy. Organizations need the ability to predefine conditions, rules, and policies that regulate AI-ready datasets. This includes creating and monitoring data contracts that explicitly define how data can be used based on purpose and regulatory and privacy frameworks.

With Data Policy Enforcement, OneTrust automates governance by transforming policies into enforceable, machine-readable code. Instead of relying on manual assessments, manual access policy rules being created, periodic audits, and manual revisions, it applies governance dynamically within data pipelines. This ensures continuous compliance, reducing administrative overhead while mitigating risk.