Proofpoint Unveils Agentic AI Solution for Human Communications Intelligence
Proofpoint has announced the launch of the industry’s first agentic AI solution for Human Communications Intelligence (HCI), marking a significant leap forward in how organizations detect, understand, and mitigate conduct and compliance risks in real time. Designed for enterprises in regulated and highly litigious industries, it transforms digital communications governance (DCG) from post-incident compliance to real-time, AI-powered risk reasoning, detection, and prevention, empowering organizations to act on human behavior before it becomes a compliance, security, or legal event.
A recent study of 1,600 global CISOs reveals that more than one-third cite collaboration tools, such as Slack, Teams, or Zoom, as their top concern for introducing organizational risk, surpassing GenAI chatbots, perimeter devices, cloud storage, and even Microsoft 365. Yet for decades, compliance teams have relied on connectors and archives that capture communications but offer little AI-powered intelligence. In today’s environment of escalating insider threats, financial misconduct, and regulatory scrutiny, enterprises need intelligence that goes beyond raw capture and archiving to reason through real-time conversations, detect intent and behaviors, as well as signal risk.
Proofpoint’s Digital Communications Governance (DCG) portfolio introduces Human Communications Intelligence, powered by true agentic AI and built to reason, not just react. Unlike existing solutions that use AI to flag keywords or patterns, Proofpoint’s HCI interprets human intent, capturing and contextualizing communications across more than 80 channels in real time. Powered by Proofpoint’s Nuclei technology (acquired by Proofpoint earlier this year), intelligent agents autonomously assess conversations, flag risks as they emerge, and provide transparent reasoning for every action.
“Legacy connectors are merely proxies that pass content downstream, offering little intelligence,” said Harry Labana, SVP & GM of Proofpoint’s DCG business. “Proofpoint has reimagined capture by moving beyond simply collecting messages to interpreting and reasoning in real time. This transforms the world’s largest source of behavioral data—human conversations—into actionable intelligence that empowers compliance, legal, and security teams to prevent risk before it escalates.”
Key capabilities for Proofpoint’s AI-powered DCG portfolio include:
- Real-Time Communications Intelligence: Proofpoint Capture, powered by Nuclei technology, ingests communication channels including GenAI chatbots, mobile messaging, collaboration apps, social media, email, voice, and files and applies real-time reasoning. Unlike pretrained AI models and legacy connectors, Proofpoint Capture includes purpose-built reasoning AI agents that interpret communications at scale and can integrate with third-party archives. These agents autonomously present reasoning alongside flagged content, such as misconduct, insider threats, AI misuse, regulatory violations, and even toxic culture signals, explaining why decisions are made. This transparency ensures compliance reviewers and investigators understand the logic behind each alert, rather than being left with opaque classifications.
- Explainable, Cost-Effective AI-powered Supervision: Proofpoint is redefining supervision with a new class of explainable AI tailored for regulated communications review. Legacy keyword and rules-based systems are limited in the types of risks they can detect, and as communication volumes rise, false positives grow. Proofpoint Supervision analyzes 100% of captured communications with advanced detection that understands tone, intent, shorthand, emojis, and even code snippets, across multiple languages. The result: up to a 90% reduction in long-tail noise, far greater precision, and significantly less manual review — delivering scalable, auditable supervision for today’s most complex compliance environments.
- Integrated, Signal-Driven Risk Prevention: Signals generated by Proofpoint’s Human Communications Intelligence agents integrate directly with Proofpoint Insider Threat Management (ITM), correlating communications-based risk indicators with user activity across endpoints. This integration surfaces motive, means, and modes of risk across the Insider Threat Matrix and empowers organizations to act before behavior escalates into compliance violations, breaches, or litigation. By connecting what employees say with what they do, Proofpoint establishes the industry’s first real-time feedback loop. It also provides compliance and legal teams with a proactive shield and an auditable record of oversight, enabling defensible compliance outcomes and earlier intervention before issues escalate.
Proofpoint’s Human Communications Intelligence agents, powered by Nuclei technology, are available today. AI-powered enhancements, including a new class of LLMs for Proofpoint Supervision, are expected in Q4 2025. Integration with Insider Threat Management is planned for Q1 2026.
