BigID launches BigAI, a ‘privacy-by-design’ LLM  designed to discover data

Today, data discovery and classification provider BigID announced the launch of BigAI, a new large language model (LLM) designed to scan and classify enterprises’ data to optimize their security and enhance risk management initiatives.

BigAI enables organizations to scan structured and unstructured data whether stored in the cloud or on-premises, using a mix of ML-driven classification and generative AI to suggest titles and descriptions for data tables, columns and clusters so they’re easier to locate via search.

The announcement comes amid a wave of providers unveiling plans to use LLMs as part of security use cases, including Google Cloud Security AI Workbench and SentinelOne, unveiled yesterday at RSAC 2023. 

“BigAI basically embraces generative AI capabilities: adapting the latest in generative to help you know your data — and control your data. Data is messy — BigAI helps make sense of that data: faster, more accurately, and securely,” said CEO Dimitri Sirota in an email to VentureBeat.

A privacy-by-design LLM

One of the elements that makes this launch notable is BigAI’s use of a privacy-by-design approach, which enables the LLM to process an organization’s data with the vendor’s own private models and servers without exposing anything to public models. 

Another key differentiator from solutions like Google Cloud Security AI Workbench, which focus on threat detection and orchestration use cases, is the solution’s use of a virtual personal assistant called BigChat, which is designed to act as a copilot that can support human users to manage compliance challenges. 

BigChat uses BigID documentation, PDFs, guides, forum posts and articles to provide answers to users’ questions. For example, a user could ask how to identify and classify sensitive data to ensure compliance with regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA. 

As Sirota argued, “BigID is the only solution that’s built on deep data discovery; it’s able to adapt generative AI and make data easier to find, understand and ultimately protect.”