Sensitive Data + Secure AI: RSAC 2025 Sees Two Worlds Comings Together

“It’s very interesting so far. You can feel two worlds coming together, and folks are trying to make sense of it.” Confidencial Sales Director Matthew Schmitt @ RSAC 2025

Security is about protecting data, and AI is about putting it to work. Enabling both is the key to building what’s next.

As fresh and new as AI might feel, it exposes, and amplifies, lots of traditional cybersecurity risks. Our digital world is already composed of millions of moving pieces and services, and AI simply lets us move and manage them faster than ever—and all at once.

As RSAC reminds us, time and time again, the most compelling enterprise AI use cases typically fall into two buckets:

• Human expertise that’s made more effective by ingesting, understanding, and acting on volumes of information too large for manual workflows or where the cost of waiting on answers gets too high

• Human innovation and creativity that’s made more impactful by connecting, ideating, and iterating across the same depth and breadth of information and ideas that would be hard to achieve with the same speed and scale.

Whatever metaphor you choose to use, you can see the alchemy in action, as AI and generative AI transform data into new ideas or, alternatively, execute on that data in new and imaginative ways. Without data, often sensitive data, there is no context, and without context, AI goes back to being a very expensive calculator.

Data security is the blocker—and the way forward—to really unlocking AI

So if sensitive data is valuable (and valuable data is sensitive), the race for AI value is either lost or won in our pursuit of data protection, sensitive unstructured data security in particular. If the data can’t be protected, the rules say it can’t be shared. And if it can’t be shared--- we’re back to an expensive calculator.

The final answer won’t be found at RSAC – but important questions and conversations around data protection and secure AI are here

As we see vendors, customers, stakeholders, regulators, and everybody else mingle on the floor and across RSAC events this week, it’s easy to be impressed by the amount of innovation, expertise, and plain old-fashioned hard work you can get in one place. The future of digital transformation depends on the progress around AI.

This is why the data protection discussion is no longer an afterthought, it’s fundamental to everything else in play:

• Regulators and consumers are taking power and privacy back, meaning data protection laws are only getting tougher

• Attackers are watching to see how companies bring their crown jewel data sets to life with AI—and working to understand how they can be exploited

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At the end of the day, business leaders say AI is a risk they’re willing to buy. So now what?

Listen closely and maybe you’ll hear it too

While big new product upgrades and even some cool new ideas are bound to drop at RSA, it’s probably the conversations being held off-stage that mean the most going forward. It’s peers collaborating with each other to discuss challenges and solutions around enabling AI while protecting sensitive data.

It’s also vendors doing the same, having the same important conversations about secure Gen AI, data protection requirements, and how to move from AI uncertainty to something that’s positive while still exciting, if even the future isn’t yet 100% revealed.

• How can technology help strengthen foundations like AI data governance?

• How do cool new features like Confidencial’s selective encryption change the playing field?

• How will AI vendors themselves work to bake more security and transparency into what they build?

Let's get started on what's next

• If you’re at RSAC, stop by and say hi at Booth North 5787.

• If you’re ready to ready your data for secure sharing and AI, see what Confidencial can do for you.