Using AI Agents Requires a Balance of Trust, Privacy, Compliance

We’ve entered an era where artificial intelligence has evolved from answering questions to being able to take actions and reason on our behalf. While this new horizon may pose significant challenges, it can unlock unprecedented opportunities for organizations—including for legal, compliance, and corporate affairs teams—if approached responsibly.

Adding an agentic layer to a global legal affairs team can be a provocative concept. But legal teams can leverage AI agents to enhance their operations and help lead their organizations through this transformative age. Yet they must first understand the technology and its potential for business—then learn to use it themselves.

Unlike chatbots and standalone large language models, agentic AI can make decisions within guardrails, perform tasks, and adapt to new information without constant human intervention. This level of autonomy allows businesses to achieve a new level of partnership between humans and agents, allocating resources and headcount for greater business impact while streamlining operations, improving efficiency, and providing high-quality and personalized service to internal and external customers and stakeholders

Legal teams can explore using AI agents in several ways, including streamlining management of outside counsel, automating responses to internal inquiries, and expanding team capabilities. Ultimately, agentic AI will also play a role in driving resilience and future-proofing organizations.

Cornerstone of Trust

Fostering trust in AI systems is essential, and gauging how much trust to put into AI agents starts with trusting the data, understanding the reasoning, and selecting the actions to advance agentically. Access to high-quality, unified, grounded, and curated data is crucial to deliver accurate and dependable results. This extends beyond the integrity of data collection and storage to encompass how companies use and deploy data in AI-generated outputs.

While policymakers worldwide are introducing AI-specific regulations, from the European Union’s AI Act to Colorado’s state-level AI law, legal teams will play an increasingly critical role in advising and ensuring AI applications adhere to appropriate privacy frameworks.

By implementing robust data governance, privacy-by-design principles, and safeguards addressing how AI agents can process data and perform tasks—coupled with maintaining human handoffs, oversight, and engagement when needed—legal leaders can help their organizations navigate regulatory uncertainty.

Building Ethical Guardrails

The responsible adoption of agentic AI depends on safeguarding trust and prioritizing privacy while empowering innovation. The lack of definitive, globally applicable AI regulations presents both a challenge and an opportunity for legal teams to inform—if not shape—their organizations’ AI strategies.

Companies can develop key guidelines for agentic AI development, deployment, and adoption. These may include ensuring transparency in how AI makes decisions, prioritizing relevant and accurate results (such as by grounding output in relevant organizational knowledge), mitigating risks, and establishing clear parameters for human escalation.

By focusing on these guiding principles, organizations can leverage and design AI solutions that empower colleagues, drive customer success, and help future-proof innovations as regulations take shape.

Business Strategy Tips

Legal teams can sometimes get pigeonholed with a reputation as business blockers rather than business enablers. But the new agentic AI frontier presents an opportunity for legal teams to position—or reinforce—themselves as innovation partners, helping to harness the potential of AI agents while maintaining trust, compliance, and ethical integrity.

Although this evolution may take some time, legal teams can take several steps now to incorporate AI agents into their business strategy:

• Enable the team. Have a plan for how you and your colleagues will increase your understanding of the opportunities that agentic solutions can provide with respect to mitigating risk, accelerating operational transformation, and advancing functional priorities—all in a way that is enterprise-grade and enterprise-ready.
• Shift the team’s mindset. By approaching innovation to go beyond “is this legal” to the framework of “how can we do this responsibly for impact,” legal teams can serve as valuable business partners from the outset.
• Take inventory of your data. Have relevant teams engaged in assessing applicable data sources and how inaccurate data can be removed or replaced with the correct information.
• Establish or update ethical guardrails and acceptable use policies. By advocating for and collaborating on responsible AI practices now, legal teams can help ensure smooth adaptation when formal regulations emerge or become applicable.
• Prioritize trust. The absence of definitive laws on agentic AI can mean a lot of gray areas for businesses. If legal teams help their organizations meet or exceed customer expectations, they also will likely already be in the a better position of surpassing any legal requirements when regulations do crystallize. Legal teams can also embrace sophisticated agentic approaches that comply with your organization’s security, privacy, regulatory, and AI governance policies.

By instilling trust through measures such as ethical guidelines and security plus privacy protections, the agentic AI era can empower in-house leaders to leverage the technology to augment their own teams, address shortfalls, achieve scale in an era of “do more with less,” and play an integral role in accelerating the success of their entire organizations.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Sabastian Niles is president and chief legal officer of Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management software provider.

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