Prepare for Enterprise AI Search

Enterprise AI search and agent-based tools like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Glean represent a massive leap in productivity, streamlining the distribution of institutional knowledge and putting your organization’s collective wisdom at every employee’s fingertips. But these tools also introduce a new challenge: they amplify gaps in data security and data governance practices. Material Security provides the foundational data security posture management necessary to embrace the power of AI search safely, ensuring that speed and innovation don’t come at the cost of security.

Problem: Unchecked AI search exacerbates data leaks 

AI search tools plug directly into your existing data sources and don’t include their own system of data permissioning. In most cases, they inherit the permissions of the user who is querying them. This seemingly simple fact has profound security implications because it weaponizes years of undiscovered and unfixed data exposure issues.

The adoption of enterprise AI search surfaces several critical problems:

• Expanding the blast radius for insider threats: A sensitive file that was previously hard to find—but technically accessible—is now instantly discoverable by a simple AI prompt. AI effectively expands the threat surface of improperly-managed sensitive information, making it trivial for users to stumble upon confidential information like salary data, intellectual property, or private customer details.
• Exacerbating consequences of data sprawl: Most cloud workspaces suffer from years of permission creep. Files are shared with personal accounts, exposed via public links, or made available to the entire company when they should be restricted. AI search acts like a high-speed engine running through this minefield of over-permissive data.
• An accelerant for attackers: For a threat actor, a compromised account connected to an enterprise AI tool is the ultimate prize. Instead of slowly hunting for valuable data, they can now simply ask the AI to find the company’s most sensitive documents and exfiltrate them with alarming speed and efficiency–and when that data isn’t properly classified and labeled, the attacker doesn’t need to compromise an admin account to get to the crown jewels.
• Lack of visibility and control: Most security teams cannot definitively answer two simple questions: "Where is all of our sensitive data?" and "Who has access to it?" Without this visibility, it’s impossible to prepare your environment for an AI tool that will traverse every corner of it.

Solution: Find and protect sensitive data 

Material Security secures your data at the source, providing the essential foundation required to safely deploy powerful AI tools. Instead of slowing the adoption of AI, the platform secures the data that the AI accesses, allowing you to move forward with confidence.

• Discover and classify your data at scale: You can't protect what you can't see. Material continuously scans your entire cloud environment to discover where sensitive data lives and, more importantly, how it's exposed. We identify the toxic combinations of sensitive content and risky permissions before your AI tool does.
• Automatically remediate risky permissions: Finding problems isn't enough. Material automates the tedious work of cleaning up years of data sprawl. The platform can automatically revoke public links, remove access granted to personal email addresses, and right-size permissions on over-shared sensitive files, all without creating friction for your users.
• Supercharge native AI capabilities: Material works with, not against, the tools you already have. By automatically discovering, classifying, and applying native labels (like Google Drive labels), we provide a high-quality, accurate data set. This allows tools like Gemini to become effective faster and with greater precision.