About TranscendHow we built the platform the AI era demands

The advent of Kodak's camera marked a pivotal moment in societal reflections on privacy. It initiated public discourse on the implications of capturing and sharing personal moments, laying early groundwork for today's privacy considerations.

Just two years later, the Harvard Law Review published "The Right to Privacy", marking a cultural shift by advocating for privacy rights amidst rapid technological changes. The article emphasized the need for legal protections against the unauthorized publication of private information, highlighting the evolving necessity of personal privacy in modern society.

On August 6, 1991, the first website was introduced to the world, setting off a 'Cambrian explosion' in digital information and data collection. The proliferation of sensors in phones, homes, and public spaces dramatically changed the landscape of personal data, setting the stage for modern privacy challenges.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into full force in May 2018. Laying the foundation for modern privacy regulation, the GDPR is one of the strictest privacy laws to date, and compliance is now table stakes for doing business in the EU.

Several new privacy laws went into effect in 2020 including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the first privacy law of its kind in the US, and LGPD in Brazil.

In a landmark move, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) imposed a substantial fine on Sephora, signaling a shift in the regulatory landscape. This enforcement action, the first of its magnitude, served as a clear message to the market: privacy compliance is no longer a mere formality. It underscored the seriousness with which regulators are now approaching privacy violations, setting a precedent for rigorous enforcement and accountability in the digital age.

Marked by the widespread embrace of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other LLM chat products, the year 2023 emerged as a new era in data privacy, bringing forth unprecedented considerations and challenges in managing and protecting personal information.

In March 2024, the EU AI Act was signed into law—the first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence.
As companies raced to deploy AI, regulators made clear that the data behind those systems would be held to a higher standard. For the first time, governance of AI data became a binding requirement.

Compliance shifted from a legal formality to an operational requirement.

With new AI regulations taking effect and privacy laws expanding across the U.S., companies were under increasing pressure to prove how customer data was being used.

At the same time, AI investment surged, raising the stakes for getting it right.

Gartner is projecting $2.5 trillion in global AI spending this year, and that question of who can use the data, for what purpose, right now has never mattered more, and we've never been more ready to answer it.

Software tools are building their own governance rules and agent policies, but they all live within their own walls. The need to control what data you can use and what agents can do, across the entire tech stack has become more important than ever.

Today most enterprises settle business policy questions by hand in legal reviews while dozens of initiatives wait in line, stalling AI initiatives.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, half of AI agent deployment failures will come from insufficient runtime enforcement, so filling that gap is what finally allows businesses to accelerate towards the autonomous enterprise.