Sure, Sam. We Trust Your with Our Data
November 11, 2025
OpenAI released a new AI service called “company knowledge” that collects and analyzes all information within an organization. Why does this sound familiar? Because malware does the same thing for nefarious purposes. The story comes from Computer World and is entitled, “OpenAI’s Company Knowledge Wants Access To All Of Your Internal Data.”
A major problem is that OpenAI is a still a relatively young company and organizations are reluctant to share all of their data with it. AI is still an untested pool and so much can go wrong when it comes to regulating security and privacy. Here’s another clincher in the deal:
“Making granting that trust yet more difficult is the lack of clarity around the ultimate OpenAI business model. Specifically, how much OpenAI will leverage sensitive enterprise data in terms of selling it, even with varying degrees of anonymization, or using it to train future models.”
What does the vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester, Jeff Pollard say?
“ ‘The capabilities across all these solutions are similar, and benefits exist: Context and intelligence when using AI, more efficiency for employees, and better knowledge for management.”
But there’s a big but that Pollard makes clear:
“ ‘Data privacy, security, regulatory, compliance, vendor lock-in, and, of course, AI accuracy and trust issues. But for many organizations, the benefits of maximizing the value of AI outweighs the risks.’”
The current AI situation is that applications are transiting from isolated to connected agents and agentic systems developed to maximize value for the users. In other words, according to Pollard, “high risk and high reward.” The rewards are tempting but the consequences are also alarming.
Experts say that companies won’t place all of their information and proprietary knowledge in the hands of a young company and untested technology. They could but there aren’t any regulations to protect them.
OpenAI should practice with its own company first, then see what happens.
Whitney Grace, November 11, 2025
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
