Data Security Posture Management for AI

A special thanks to Chris Jeffrey for his contributions as a peer reviewer to this blog post.

Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI provides a unified location to monitor how AI Applications (Microsoft Copilot, AI systems created in Azure AI Foundry, AI Agents, and AI applications using 3^rd party Large Language Models). This Blog Post aims to provide the reader with a holistic understanding of achieving Data Security and Governance using Purview Data Security and Governance for AI offering. Purview DSPM is not to be confused with Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) which is covered in the Blog Post Demystifying Cloud Security Posture Management for AI.

Benefits

When an organization adopts Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), it unlocks a powerful suite of AI-focused security benefits that helps them have a more secure AI adoption journey.

Unified Visibility into AI Activities & Agents

DSPM centralizes visibility across both Microsoft Copilots and third-party AI tools—capturing prompt-level interactions, identifying AI agents in use, and detecting shadow AI deployments across the enterprise.

 

 

One‑Click AI Security & Data Loss Prevention Policies

Prebuilt policies simplify deployment with a single click, including: Automatic detection and blocking of sensitive data in AI prompts, Controls to prevent data leakage to third-party LLMs, and Endpoint-level DLP enforcement across browsers (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) for third-party AI site usage.

 

 

Sensitive Data Risk Assessments & Risky Usage Alerts

DSPM runs regular automated and on-demand scans of top-priority SharePoint/E3 sites, AI interactions, and agent behavior to identify high-risk data exposures. This helps in detecting oversharing of confidential content, highlight compliance gaps and misconfigurations, and provides actionable remediation guidance.

 

 

Actionable Insights & Prioritized Remediation

The DSPM for AI overview dashboard offers actionable insights, including: Real-time analytics, usage trends, and risk scoring for AI interactions, and Integration with Security Copilot to guide investigations and remediation during AI-driven incidents.

 

 

Features and Coverage

Data Security Posture Management for AI (DSPM-AI) helps you gain insights into AI usage within the organization, the starting point is activating the recommended preconfigured policies using single-click activations.

The default behavior for DSPM-AI is to run weekly data risk assessments for the top 100 SharePoint sites (based on usage) and provide data security admins with relevant insights.

Organizations get an overview of how data is being accessed and used by AI tools.

 

Data Security administrators can use on-demand classifiers as well to ensure that all contents are properly classified or scan items that were not scanned to identify whether they contain any sensitive information or not.

 

AI access to data in SharePoint site can be controlled by the Data Security administrator using DSPM-AI. The admin can specify restrictions based on data labels or can apply a blanket restriction to all data in a specific site.

 

Organizations can further expand the risks assessments with their own custom data risk assessments, a feature that is currently in preview.

Thanks to its recommendations section, DSPM-AI helps data security administrators achieve faster time to value. Below is a sample of the policy to “Capture interactions for enterprise AI apps” that can be created using recommendations.

 

More details about the recommendations that a Data Security Administrator can expect can be found at the DSPM-AI Documentation, these recommendations might be different in the environment based on what is relevant to each organization.

Following customers’ feedback, Microsoft have announced during Ignite 2025 (18-21 Nov 2025, San Francisco – California) the inclusion of these recommendations in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) recommendations section, this helps Data Security Administrators view all relevant data security recommendations in the same place whether they apply to human interactions, tools interactions, or AI interactions of the data. More details about the new Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) experience are published in the Purview Technical Blog site under the article Beyond Visibility: The new Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) experience.

After creating/enabling the Data Security Policies,  Data Security Administrators can view reports that show AI usage patterns in the organization, in these reports Data Security Administrators will have visibility into interaction activities.

 

Including the ability to dig into details.

 

In the same reports view, Data Security Administrators will also be able to view reports regarding AI interactions with data including sensitive interactions and unethical interactions.

 

And similar to activities, the Data Security Administrator can dig into Data interactions.

 

Under reports, Data Security Administrators will also have visibility regarding risky user interaction patterns with the ability to drill down into details.

Adaption

This section provides an overview of the requirements to enable Data Security Posture Management for AI in an organization’s tenant.

License Requirements

The license requirements for Data Security Posture Management for AI depends on what features the organization needs and what AI workloads they expect to cover.

To cover Interaction, Prompts, and Response in DSPM for AI, the organization needs to have a Microsoft 365 E5 license, this will cover activities from: Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Security Copilot, Copilot in Fabric for Power BI only, Custom Copilot Studio Agents, Entra-registered AI Applications, ChatGPT enterprise, Azure AI Services, Purview browser extension, Browser Data Security, and Network Data Security. Information regarding licensing in this article is provided for guidance purposes only and doesn’t provide any contractual commitment. This list and license requirements are subject to change without any prior notice and readers are encouraged to consult with their Account Executive to get up-to-date information regarding license requirements and coverage.

User Access Rights requirements

To be able to view, create, and edit in Data Security Posture Management for AI, the user should have a role or role group:

• Microsoft Entra Compliance Administrator role
• Microsoft Entra Global Administrator role
• Microsoft Purview Compliance Administrator role group

To have a view-only access to Data Security Posture Management for AI, the user should have a role or role group:

• Microsoft Purview Security Reader role group
• Purview Data Security AI Viewer role
• AI Administrator role from Entra
• Purview Data Security AI Content Viewer role for AI interactions only
• Purview Data Security Content Explorer Content Viewer role for AI interactions and file details for data risk assessments only

 

For more details, including permissions needed per activity, please refer to the Permissions for Data Security Posture Management for AI documentation page.

Technical Requirements

To start using Data Security Posture Management for AI, a set of technical requirements need to be met to achieve the desired visibility, these include:

• Activating Microsoft Purview Audit: Microsoft Purview Audit is an integrated solution that help organizations effectively respond to security events, forensic investigations, internal investigations, and compliance obligations.
• Enterprise version of Microsoft Purview data governance: Needed to support the required APIs to cover Copilot in Fabric and Security Copilot.
• Installing Microsoft Purview browser extension: The Microsoft Purview Compliance Extension for Edge, Chrome, and Firefox collects signals that help you detect sharing sensitive data with AI websites and risky user activity activities on AI websites.
• Onboard devices to Microsoft Purview: Onboarding user devices to Microsoft Purview allows activity monitoring and enforcement of data protection policies when users are interacting with AI apps.
• Entra-registered AI Applications: Should be integrated with the Microsoft Purview SDK.

More details regarding consideration for deploying Data Security Posture Management for AI can be found in the Data Security Posture Management for AI considerations documentation page.

Conclusion

Data Security Posture Management for AI helps Data Security Administrators gain more visibility regarding how AI Applications (Systems, Agents, Copilot, etc.) are interacting with their data. Based on the license entitlements an organization has under its agreement with Microsoft, the organization might already have access to these capabilities and can immediately start leveraging them to reduce the potential impact of any data-associated risks originating from its AI systems.