Agentic AI That Is Secure by Design: Keeping Data In, Risks Out

Artificial intelligence is transforming how organizations handle data, but in legal, compliance, and forensic contexts, innovation can’t come at the cost of control.
That’s why Exterro built Exterro Assist for Data—an agentic AI system developed entirely in-house to deliver trustworthy, defensible insights without ever compromising data security.

This article focuses on that system—the agentic foundation of Exterro Intelligence—not every AI feature across the Exterro platform. Assist for Data is where Exterro’s approach to privacy-first, explainable, and verifiable AI comes fully to life.

A Security-First System, Purpose-Built for Legal and Compliance Workflows

While other vendors bolt AI features onto existing products, Exterro Assist for Data was engineered from the ground up for sensitive, high-risk environments.
It’s not a generic large language model, not a generative text assistant, and not a third-party API integration. It’s an agentic system—a network of expert AI agents and orchestration logic that analyze, validate, and summarize complex data entirely within your own trusted infrastructure.

At the center of this framework is the TAS Protocol, a core principle of Exterro Intelligence:

1. No Training – Exterro’s AI agents never train on customer data. There’s no learning loop, no dataset reuse, and no risk of data influencing model behavior.
2. No Access – All processing occurs within the customer’s environment (on-prem, private cloud, or hybrid). No data leaves your boundary for inference or storage.
3. No Storage – Queries, outputs, and intermediate results remain inside your governance perimeter and follow your organization’s retention policies.

These rules make Assist for Data a closed-loop system, ensuring that your information stays secure, compliant, and defensible at every stage.

Deployment That Adapts to You

Because every organization’s risk posture is different, Assist for Data offers flexible deployment options while maintaining identical security and audit controls:

• On-Premises: For law enforcement, defense, and sectors requiring absolute isolation.
• Private Cloud (Customer-Owned VPC): Scalable cloud performance under your key management and identity controls.
• Hybrid: Distribute workloads securely across environments while maintaining unified oversight.

In every model, orchestration logic, agent execution, and validation all occur inside your tenant. No query, document, or log data is sent to an external model provider.

This is the architectural boundary that separates Exterro’s agentic framework from most commercial AI offerings—which often rely on third-party APIs for processing and hidden cloud storage for temporary data caching.

Built for Compliance: Certifications and Framework Alignment

Exterro Intelligence—the foundation underlying Assist for Data—meets or exceeds global enterprise assurance standards, including:

• SOC 2 Type II – Verified operational and security controls.
• HITRUST and TiSAX – Data protection aligned to healthcare and automotive standards.
• FedRAMP Moderate – U.S. federal-grade security authorization.
• GDPR, HIPAA, and CPRA alignment – Privacy principles embedded throughout the data lifecycle.

Assist for Data inherits all of these controls, giving customers a clear path to demonstrate regulatory compliance and AI accountability.

The Problem with “Black Box” AI

Many enterprise AI tools use generalized LLMs or vendor APIs that process data outside the organization’s network. For legal and compliance teams, this creates three critical risks:

1. Data Residency: Sensitive information is often processed in unknown or cross-border environments.
2. Model Drift: External models change behavior without notice, undermining reproducibility and defensibility.
3. Opaque Logging: Users can’t see how answers are generated or verify data lineage.

Assist for Data eliminates these problems. Its agentic architecture—built on Exterro’s proprietary orchestration layer and specialized expert agents—runs entirely within your control. Model versions are pinned, results are validated, and every action is logged for audit.

This isn’t AI as a service. It’s AI as a secure system of record.

Defense in Depth: Embedded Security Controls

Security by design means more than encryption. It means enforcing layered, measurable protection from the ground up. Assist for Data does exactly that through:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Restricts agent and user permissions by task and data domain, with the ability to permission specific users to have (or not have) access to Exterro Assist functionality.
• Encryption in Transit and at Rest: AES-256 and TLS 1.3 standards across all environments.
• Immutable Audit Logs: Every agent and human action recorded for forensics or compliance review.
• Customer-Managed Keys: Integration with enterprise key management systems.
• Integrity Monitoring: Internal validation agents continuously verify environment compliance and anomaly detection.

This combination gives IT and legal teams full visibility into how data is accessed, used, and protected at every step.

Compliant by Construction

The EU AI Act, U.S. Executive Orders, and similar frameworks all emphasize the same principle: organizations must prove their AI systems are transparent, explainable, and under human control.

Assist for Data satisfies those requirements from the start:

• All decisions are traceable and logged.
• All outputs cite their sources.
• All environments operate under your data governance and jurisdiction.

That’s what makes it a defensible system—engineered for compliance, not merely checked for it.

Exterro Assist for Data represents the most secure expression of Exterro Intelligence’s vision: AI that accelerates insight without surrendering control.

It’s an agentic system, purpose-built for regulated work—one that keeps your data in, keeps your risks out, and makes AI truly accountable to your organization.

That’s not just “AI security.” That’s security by design.