Proofpoint has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions (DCGA). This is our third consecutive year as a Leader. As I reflect on what was written in the report and in the companion Critical Capabilities report, two use cases, as defined by Gartner, surface immediately for me: AI communications governance and investigations. In this blog, I share my perspectives on why you need to consider these use cases now.
Focus on AI communications governance
Every enterprise is incorporating AI tools across their workforce. This makes AI a new communications channel that must be considered for regulatory compliance and legal liability. Our clients are asking: What AI interactions must I capture? How do I apply governance policy to people, assistants, and agents? And how do I apply the evidence if there is an issue with legal or regulators? That is why DCGA solutions are so important in the AI era.
We believe Proofpoint is ideally suited to help clients embrace AI communications governance and deploy integrated solutions for governing AI use in many ways. Our acquisition of Acuity earlier this year augmented our capabilities with AI runtime protection for users and agents. At Proofpoint Protect, we announced the industry’s first Agentic Data and AI Security System, demonstrating at the conference key capabilities for zero-touch detection, instant investigation, and protection optimization. As stated in our announcement of intent to acquire Varonis, we stand to establish the industry’s largest data and AI cybersecurity organization, with a platform that helps organizations adopt AI with confidence.
How does this tie into digital communications governance (DCG)? As an industry leader in both Security and DCG technology, Proofpoint brings communications governance and security context together. We are not just capturing communications for compliance. We are applying intelligence across communications, behavior, data, and AI interactions to understand risk and investigate what happened.
Clients across logistics, technology, and healthcare, for example, have already adopted Communications Insights for ITM, uncovering insider threat risk in digital communications. In September, we added the ability to capture and analyze potential insider risk insights from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini content and visualize them in ITM through the Data Security Workbench.
AI is expanding what constitutes a governed communication, who or what participates in it, and what compliance teams need to understand after the fact. Proofpoint will help our customers through that evolution.
Focus on investigations
While technology supporting investigations continues to evolve, the expectations stemming from them are also evolving. It is no longer simply about finding and exporting communications. Compliance and IT teams need to quickly understand what happened across a growing number of channels and data sources.
Speed remains fundamental. Proofpoint uniquely backs average archive search performance with a financial SLA. Customers get search results in seconds, and if Proofpoint does not meet defined performance thresholds, they are entitled to a service credit. That gives you a measurable commitment, not simply a promise of fast search.
But faster search is only part of the opportunity. Prism Investigator is designed to move investigations from search-driven workflows toward autonomous event reconstruction. Natural language interaction, autonomous actions, and explainability help investigators move more quickly from a question to an understanding of what happened. Initially launched with Proofpoint Archive, Prism now also supports direct collection from Microsoft 365. And we are just getting started.
As AI assistants and agents become part of everyday business operations, investigations will increasingly need to establish not only what people communicated, but what AI systems accessed, generated, and acted upon. The challenge is no longer simply finding information. It is connecting evidence across systems to understand what happened, why it matters, and what action is required. This is where Proofpoint’s deep experience in communications governance, combined with our ability to connect communications intelligence with broader security context, gives us a strong foundation to help customers investigate these emerging risks.
Get your copy of the report
Download your complimentary copy of the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions report to learn more – it is available here.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions, by Michael Hoeck, Rizvan Hussain, Apurva Singh, 29 October 2026
Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Digital Communications Governance and Archiving Solutions, Rizvan Hussain, Apurva Singh, Michael Hoeck, 29 October 2026
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