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Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Introducing ACL Hydration: safe information workflows for agentic AI


Your brokers are solely nearly as good because the information they will entry — and solely as secure because the permissions they implement.

We’re launching ACL Hydration (entry management checklist hydration) to safe information workflows within the DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform: a unified framework for ingesting unstructured enterprise content material, preserving source-system entry controls, and implementing these permissions at question time — so your brokers retrieve the appropriate data for the appropriate person, each time.

The issue: enterprise information with out enterprise safety

Each group constructing agentic AI runs into the identical wall. Your brokers want entry to information locked inside SharePoint, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, Slack, and dozens of different methods. However connecting to these methods is barely half the problem. The tougher downside is guaranteeing that when an agent retrieves a doc to reply a query, it respects the identical permissions that govern who can see that doc within the supply system.

Immediately, most RAG implementations ignore this solely. Paperwork get chunked, embedded, and saved in a vector database with no report of who was — or wasn’t — alleged to entry them. This can lead to a system the place a junior analyst’s question surfaces board-level monetary paperwork, or the place a contractor’s agent retrieves HR recordsdata meant just for inner management. The problem isn’t simply the right way to propagate permissions from the info sources throughout the inhabitants of the RAG system — these permissions have to be constantly refreshed as individuals are added to or faraway from entry teams. That is important to maintain synchronized controls over who can entry varied forms of supply content material.

This isn’t a theoretical threat. It’s the explanation safety groups block GenAI rollouts, compliance officers hesitate to log out, and promising agent pilots stall earlier than reaching manufacturing. Enterprise prospects have been specific: with out access-control-aware retrieval, agentic AI can’t transfer past sandboxed experiments.

Present options don’t remedy this properly. Some can implement permissions — however solely inside their very own ecosystems. Others assist connectors throughout platforms however lack native agent workflow integration. Vertical functions are restricted to inner search with out platform extensibility. None of those choices give enterprises what they really want: a cross-platform, ACL-aware information layer purpose-built for agentic AI.

What DataRobot offers

DataRobot’s safe information workflows present three foundational, interlinked capabilities within the Agent Workforce Platform for safe information and context administration.

1. Enterprise information connectors for unstructured content material

Hook up with the methods the place your group’s information really lives. At launch, we’re offering production-grade connectors for SharePoint, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, OneDrive, and Field — with Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dropbox, Microsoft Groups, Gmail, and Outlook following in subsequent releases.

Every connector helps full historic backfill for preliminary ingestion and scheduled incremental syncs to maintain your vector databases present. You management entry and handle connections via APIs or the DataRobot UI.

These aren’t light-weight integrations. They’re constructed to deal with production-scale workloads — 100GB+ of unstructured information — with sturdy error dealing with, retries, and sync standing monitoring.

2. ACL Hydration and metadata preservation

That is the core differentiator. When DataRobot ingests paperwork from a supply system, it doesn’t simply extract content material — it captures and preserves the entry management metadata (ACLs) that outline who can see every doc. Consumer permissions, group memberships, position assignments — all of it’s propagated to the vector database lookup in order that retrieval is conscious of the permissioning on the info being retrieved.

Right here’s the way it works (additionally illustrated in Determine 1 beneath):

  • Throughout ingestion, document-level ACL metadata — together with person, group, and position permissions — is extracted from the supply system and persevered alongside the vectorized content material.
  • ACLs are saved in a centralized cache, decoupled from the vector database itself. It is a important architectural choice: when permissions change within the supply system, we replace the ACL cache with out reindexing your entire VDB. Permission modifications propagate to all downstream shoppers mechanically. This contains permissioning for domestically uploaded recordsdata, which respect DataRobot RBAC.
  • Close to real-time ACL refresh retains the system in sync with supply permissions. DataRobot constantly polls and refreshes ACLs inside minutes. When somebody’s entry is revoked in SharePoint or a Google Drive folder is restructured, these modifications are mirrored in DataRobot on a scheduled foundation — guaranteeing your brokers by no means serve stale permissions.
  • Exterior identification decision maps customers and teams out of your enterprise listing (through LDAP/SAML) to the ACL metadata, so permission checks resolve appropriately no matter how identities are represented throughout completely different supply methods.

3. Dynamic permission enforcement at question time

Storing ACLs is important however not enough. The actual work occurs at retrieval time.

When an agent queries the vector database on behalf of a person, DataRobot’s authorization layer evaluates the saved ACL metadata in opposition to the requesting person’s identification, group memberships, and roles — in actual time. Solely embeddings the person is permitted to entry are returned. The whole lot else is filtered earlier than it ever reaches the LLM.

This implies two customers can ask the identical agent the identical query and obtain completely different solutions — not as a result of the agent is inconsistent, however as a result of it’s appropriately scoping its information to what every person is permitted to see.

For paperwork ingested with out exterior ACLs (corresponding to domestically uploaded recordsdata), DataRobot’s inner authorization system (AuthZ) handles entry management, guaranteeing constant permission enforcement no matter how content material enters the platform.

The way it works: step-by-step

Step 1: Join your information sources

Register your enterprise information sources in DataRobot. Authenticate through OAuth, SAML, or service accounts relying on the supply system. Configure what to ingest — particular folders, file varieties, metadata filters. DataRobot handles the preliminary backfill of historic content material.

Step 2: Ingest content material with ACL metadata

ACL Hydration enabling synchronization

As paperwork are ingested, DataRobot extracts content material for chunking and embedding whereas concurrently capturing document-level ACL metadata from the supply system. This metadata — together with person permissions, group memberships, and position assignments — is saved in a centralized ACL cache.

The content material flows via the usual RAG pipeline: OCR (if wanted), chunking, embedding, and storage in your vector database of alternative — whether or not DataRobot’s built-in FAISS-based answer or your personal Elastic, Pinecone, or Milvus occasion — with the ACLs following the info all through the workflow.

Step 3: Map exterior identities

DataRobot resolves person and group data. This mapping ensures that ACL permissions from supply methods — which can use completely different identification representations — might be precisely evaluated in opposition to the person making a question.

Group memberships, together with exterior teams like Google Teams, are resolved and cached to assist quick permission checks at retrieval time.

Step 4: Question with permission enforcement

When an agent or software queries the vector database, DataRobot’s AuthZ layer intercepts the request and evaluates it in opposition to the ACL cache. The system checks the requesting person’s identification and group memberships in opposition to the saved permissions for every candidate embedding.

Solely approved content material is returned to the LLM for response technology. Unauthorized embeddings are filtered silently — the agent responds as if the restricted content material doesn’t exist, stopping any data leakage.

Step 5: Monitor, audit, and govern

ACL Hydration governance

Each connector change, sync occasion, and ACL modification is logged for auditability. Directors can observe who linked which information sources, what information was ingested, and what permissions have been utilized — offering full information lineage and compliance traceability.

Permission modifications in supply methods are propagated via scheduled ACL refreshes, and all downstream shoppers — throughout all VDBs constructed from that supply — are mechanically up to date.

Why this issues on your brokers

Safe information workflows change what’s potential with agentic AI within the enterprise.

Brokers get the context they want with out compromising safety. By propagating ACLs, brokers have the context data they should get the job accomplished, whereas guaranteeing the info accessed by brokers and finish customers honors the authentication and authorization privileges maintained within the enterprise. An agent doesn’t develop into a backdoor to enterprise data — whereas nonetheless having all of the enterprise context wanted to do its job.

Safety groups can approve manufacturing deployments. With source-system permissions enforced end-to-end, the chance of unauthorized information publicity via GenAI isn’t simply mitigated — it’s eradicated. Each retrieval respects the identical entry boundaries that govern the supply system.

Builders can transfer sooner. As a substitute of constructing customized permission logic for each information supply, builders get ACL-aware retrieval out of the field. Join a supply, ingest the content material, and the permissions include it. This removes weeks of customized safety engineering from each agent undertaking.

Finish customers can belief the system. When customers know that the agent solely surfaces data they’re approved to see, adoption accelerates. Belief isn’t a characteristic you bolt on — it’s the results of an structure that enforces permissions by design.

Get began

Safe information workflows can be found now within the DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform. Should you’re constructing brokers that must motive over enterprise information — and also you want these brokers to respect who can see what — that is the aptitude that makes it potential. Strive DataRobot or request a demo.

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