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New research has revealed that while the adoption of AI agents in the workplace may bring productivity gains, it also brings a new world of data loss risks.
As the volume of data held by any given company continues to grow, the challenge of mining that data to boost productivity and workflows promises to deliver truly positive outcomes.
However, with that reward comes considerable risk, according to new research from cyber security firm Proofpoint.
Agentic AI, which is increasingly employed to navigate this new world of big data, is a perfect case in point. Here in Australia, 44 per cent of respondents, polled as part of Proofpoint’s annual Data Security Landscape report, said that despite surging data volumes, they rated unsupervised agentic access to data as a critical risk to their organisation.
“We’ve entered a new era of data security where insider threats, relentless data growth, and AI-driven change are testing the limits of traditional defences,” Ryan Kalember, chief strategy officer at Proofpoint, said in a statement.
However, while agentic AI is proving a challenge to sufficiently secure, insider threats continue to be a leading cause of data loss.
Forty per cent of Australian organisations admitted their most significant data loss incidents were due to malicious insiders. But even when malice isn’t a motivation, 51 per cent said compromised users were the cause, while 57 per cent attributed data loss events to third parties or careless employees.
But it’s Proofpoint’s own telemetry that tells the starkest story. According to the company’s research – which polled 1,000 security professionals from 10 countries, including Australia – just 1 per cent of users are responsible for 76 per cent of data loss events.
Sadly, the frequency of these events remains high. Australian organisations reported, on average, 11 data loss incidents in a year, with some entities reporting multiple incidents each month.
“Fragmented tools and limited visibility leave organisations exposed,” Kalember said.
“The future of data protection depends on unified, AI-powered solutions that understand content and context, adapt in real time, and secure information across both human and agent activity.”
You can read Proofpoint’s full report here.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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