AI is no longer arriving in the enterprise. It is already here, drafting emails, summarising meetings, generating reports, and shaping decisions across every major collaboration platform. For compliance teams, that changes the job description: it is no longer enough to govern what people say, because AI is now saying things too.
Few people are closer to that shift than Soniya Bopache, SVP and GM of Arctera. Speaking to UC Today, first about why AI is changing communications compliance and then about what building an AI governance strategy looks like in practice, she kept returning to the same idea: information governance is becoming the foundation on which enterprise AI is built.
Governing Human and AI-Assisted Communications Through the Same Lens
The first shift is one of scope. Organisations are no longer just governing human-generated communications. They also need to govern AI-assisted and AI-generated content that influences business decisions, from drafted emails and chat messages to summaries, meeting notes, recommendations, and responses shared with customers.
The determining factor is not who, or what, created the content. Bopache says:
“The key isn't whether a human or AI created the content, it's whether that content becomes part of the business record. If an AI-generated output can influence a business outcome, it deserves the same level of governance.”
That reframing matters because it moves compliance beyond capture and retention. Those workflows remain foundational, but AI is dramatically increasing both the volume and the complexity of business information, so organisations also need to understand, classify, and govern that information intelligently throughout its lifecycle.
AI Governance Readiness Starts With Three Questions
For organisations wondering where to begin, the answer is to understand the information landscape before scaling AI initiatives. Bopache says there are three questions every enterprise should be able to answer:
“Number one: do we know where our business information resides across collaboration platforms? Second, can we govern both human and AI-generated communications consistently? And third, do we have the policies, oversight, and auditability to use AI responsibly?”
The organisations that are most AI-ready are not necessarily those with the most advanced models, but those with the strongest foundation of trusted information and governance. AI, in other words, is only as trustworthy as the information and governance behind it.
Closing Compliance Blind Spots Across Collaboration Platforms
The readiness question is complicated by how distributed modern work has become. Business conversations happen across email, chat, meetings, and a growing set of collaboration tools, each with its own AI features, and employees do not think in terms of channels. They simply communicate.
That is why governing platform by platform no longer works. Organisations need a unified approach that provides consistent visibility, retention, surveillance, and governance across the entire information ecosystem. Bopache says:
“The more fragmented your view of information, the greater your blind spots. Those who reduce them most effectively are the ones that govern information consistently, regardless of where the conversation is taking place.”
