Copilot/enterprise AI readiness and data governance prerequisite

“As organizations grapple with the tension between the rising demand for AI tools and their current state of digital maturity, the critical role of data readiness becomes increasingly clear.”

“At the end of the day, customers need to secure data before implementing AI strategy, and that also position as well.”

“Gartner's recent assessment shows nearly 85% of organizations are still in the first two stages and are just starting to take action to modernize their data. And less than 2% have reached that critical fourth stage, where the successful integration of generative AI can occur.”

“Gartner finds that the successful integration of generative AI happens at the fourth stage, and only after organizations have modernized their infrastructure and data to keep pace with technological changes.”

“These conversations reinforced that the success of GenAI implementation is closely tied to an organization's digital workplace maturity.”

“So let’s jump in, starting with the customer demand to leverage generative AI, contrasted with the reality of where most organizations currently are in their digital workplace journey.”

“Initially, when you talk about AI experimentations, a lot of firms are actually using a separate bucket of budget outside of traditional IT spend to do the experimentation. And once that happens to the extent that the firm decided to do a firm roll out, especially around M365 Copilot, that’s tied to their Office 365, Microsoft Office Cloud spend. Then they actually primarily goes into a primary bucket.”

“It was clear that data security and data quality are key to delivering the potential that GenAI solutions like Copilot offers.”

“Without these practices, the true value of generative AI simply cannot be realized.”

“Garner found at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof-of-concepts by the end of 2025 due to poor data quality and inadequate risk controls.”

“And by 2027, 60% of organizations will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive data governance frameworks.”

“So, there is actually a lot of access control and privilege access flavors when it comes to specifically Microsoft 365 Copilot, so – because as you know, that’s actually very much tied to the Office Graph.”

“So, we are seeing very large, obviously, experimentations, but also now increasingly a few large enterprise wide deployments of Microsoft 365 Copilot, on the premises of deploying our control suite.”

“It does highlight the need for the importance of governance and control and lifecycle management, something that traditionally only regulated industry, enterprises and government care a lot about, but also everybody cares about it, because as we know, your AI is only as good as the quality of your data.”

“We actually cited a number of statistics from Gartner and others to say, the quality of the AI experimentation and success rates that folks are seeing are really directly tied to their overall data management posture.”

“However, we from our perspective, we say that the experimentation and enterprise rollout still fundamentally depend on data quality, addressing potential loss and oversharing risks, as well as data governance and security, which is our core business.”

“So from that perspective, we are very confident on how we continue to add value because fundamentally your AI is only as good as your data.”

“Another example was a top global consulting firm which needed to strategically govern its Microsoft 365 environment before deploying 22,000 Copilot licenses.”

“Yes, great question. So with the recent disruption in commoditization and lowering the cost of large language models, we see a lot more excitement from customers to really make AI more accessible.”

“A big 4 professional services firm with 500,000 users face mounting risks from ungoverned Microsoft 365 tenants as they prepare to roll out Copilot.”

“Yes. We have seen spend level increasing with the focus around governance and also Agentic governance. I think last year is a year of experimentation. This year is a year of rollout.”

“So, experimentation typically come from just a separate bucket, but the rollout formally formalizes a spend for all AI-related work streams. So, we think that's a positive from our perspective. This is also why we continue to see our governance suite to be the fastest-growing of our offerings.”

“Similarly, a U.S. insurer with nearly 25,000 users joined as a new customer to implement structured provisioning, classification and policy enforcement, giving them the governance framework needed to confidently scale their Copilot deployment.”

“A global airline with nearly 100,000 users became a new AvePoint customer in Q2, selecting our platform to unify life cycle management and oversharing controls across Microsoft 365, a foundational step as they prepare for AI adoption.”

“Importantly, these capabilities were shaped directly by customer needs, especially from organizations preparing for large-scale Copilot rollouts and looking to mitigate oversharing and compliance risks.”

“We actually think we're still in the early innings. While Microsoft have announced Copilot deployment, have a step-up function, is still in the low double digits.”

“While AI is a powerful tool, enterprise-grade software remains essential for managing complex environments and ensuring regulatory compliance. And if your AI relies on inconsistent or poorly governed data, it becomes a liability rather than an asset.”

“And our customers and partners continue to tell us the same thing: before they can deploy AI at scale, they need one company that can secure, govern, and operationalize their data with confidence.”

“Organizations no longer view data governance as simple back-office hygiene; it has become the prerequisite for AI and agentic AI adoption.”

“Our leadership at a critical intersection of data protection and security, combined with the growing demand for AI-ready solutions, allowed us to again exceed our guidance on both the top and bottom line.”

“The way to think about it, we believe, is to understand that if this Copilot tools are going to be in the hands of knowledge users, the security -- the need for security will be almost inevitable.”

“The reality is that, at the beginning, we saw just these small POCs in the hands of IP that immediately exposed the problem, the data security problem. You have this massive blast radius.”

“This will allow this customer to safely adopt Microsoft Copilot, automatically reduce overexposures at scale, and meet its regulatory requirements.”

“This quarter, we finally started to see some deals close.”

“And once enough people are using it within the organization, it's exposing many times the data security problem.”

“So you just see that people get to a lot of critical data they don't need to get, generating a lot of critical data they shouldn't generate outside of policy, starting to just using the wrong intent and it's just extremely dangerous in terms of losing the critical data.”

“It's primarily now related to Copilot and you see it a lot on the 365, but eventually obviously you have Einstein in Salesforce and you have it for GitHub and there are – there's this type thing that is going to be part of every walk of life.”

“They also wanted to ensure their data was protected when deploying Microsoft Copilot.”

“You know what happened when we start the POC, it's their Copilot, which is a tomentous productivity tool. It's like [indiscernible]. Which just goes and inhale all the permissions that they have and then people stop and say, okay, how we are going to deploy it.”

“It still the early innings, but for them, Copilot is a lot of what they want to do in terms of productivity in the workforce, and we are securing it.”

“In July, we announced an update to our strategic partnership with Microsoft and are making significant investments to deepen our integration with them to better enable customers to securely adopt Copilot over time.”

“In the third quarter, we continue to see demand from companies looking to protect their data to safely realize productivity benefits of Copilot, and we believe we are still in the early stages of starting to capitalize on this tailwind.”