For the second time in just a few months, Transcend was honored by Fast Company—this time with a 2024 World Changing Ideas Award ‘Honorable Mention’ for our work on artificial intelligence (AI) governance. This prestigious recognition highlights projects that leverage the power of AI, machine learning, and data to make the world more accessible, equitable, and sustainable.

Transcend was honored in the AI and Data category, which celebrates innovations that harness data and AI technology in order to empower societal change. This year, the competition was fierce with over 280 groundbreaking projects. Among these, Transcend's Pathfinder, which ensures businesses can manage and audit data flows in and out of large language models (LLMs) effectively and ethically, stood out for its unique approach to AI governance.

We’re proud of this Fast Company recognition as we build the new frontier of AI governance. For enterprise leaders working on this challenge, we see this work breaking down into four key initiatives:

1. Establish your single source of truth. Switching from outdated survey methods to real-time data classification and discovery is key to ensuring enterprise compliance with both privacy and AI regulations (like the EU AI Act). This is the most crucial foundational step.
2. Get smarter on assessments. Companies need simple, scalable, and fully customizable assessments that are uniquely built to unlock efficiency, enhance collaboration, and support more comprehensive compliance through proactive risk management. 
3. Policy monitoring and enforcement. Robust AI governance is essential for enforcing accountability, and ensuring data is handled ethically throughout its lifecycle. This includes the adoption of policies for data quality, usage limits, and the protection of sensitive information. Pathfinder is a patent-pending middleware layer that governs all data going into and out of large language models, enforcing policies at the code level.
4. Easily enforce AI consent preferences: Regulators have emphasized the importance of user consent when harnessing AI across contexts. Enterprises need to implement solutions to enforce consent preferences for users who don’t want their data used for AI training, or who want to opt out of automated decision-making. Unlike legacy consent solutions that rely on manual methods, Transcend Consent Management provides automated data flow regulation and granular classification—enabling comprehensive consent management at the code level.

This is Transcend’s second recognition from Fast Company this year. In March, Transcend was named to Fast Company’s prestigious list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024—alongside Nvidia, Microsoft, Canva, OpenAI, and more. 

Being recognized in this year’s World Changing Ideas Awards is not just a recognition of Transcend's commitment to innovation but also a testament to the critical importance of data governance in today’s tech landscape. We are proud to contribute to creating a world where technology empowers, protects, and helps ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all.