Commvault launches AI tools to secure enterprise data
Commvault has introduced new and forthcoming artificial intelligence tools in Commvault Cloud designed to help businesses adopt AI while retaining control over data, agents and recovery.
The announcement focuses on three products: Data Activate, AI Protect and AI Studio. Together, they are meant to help companies prepare approved datasets for AI use, discover and govern AI agents, and recover systems after agent-driven changes.
The move reflects broader concern among large organisations about how to use AI systems without exposing sensitive information or losing oversight of automated tools. Citing Deloitte research, Commvault said 60% of AI leaders identify risk, compliance concerns and legacy system integration as the main barriers to adopting agentic AI.
Data Activate is aimed at organisations that want to use information held in backup copies for AI work. It classifies and curates data from protected backups, then prepares approved datasets in formats including Apache Iceberg and Parquet for use with large language models and AI data platforms.
The product continuously publishes updated datasets vetted under Commvault's governance rules. Teams can also identify and exclude personally identifiable information before using the data in model development.
Three products
AI Protect focuses on oversight and recovery in AI-driven environments. Commvault said it will identify vulnerabilities, show the impact of agent-driven changes, recover affected applications and perform full-stack recovery across environments using AI tools.
The product will also discover and inventory agents across environments and map their activity to AI stacks. This reflects a growing concern in enterprise IT that AI agents can alter data, systems and configurations at speed, making faults or unwanted changes harder to trace.
AI Studio is intended to give customers a way to create and use agents for specific tasks. It will include a repository of built-in agents for common resilience use cases, while also allowing teams to build custom agents using the company's Model Context Protocol server and connect them with other enterprise systems.
The announcement expands Commvault's argument that AI adoption depends as much on resilience as on model development. The company has increasingly framed backup, governance and recovery as central issues for businesses using AI in production environments.
"Every enterprise era has produced a system of record - ERP for business operations, CRM for customers, and now AI for the enterprise," said Sanjay Mirchandani, President and CEO, Commvault. "If data powering AI is compromised, AI is compromised. If data can't be recovered, AI can't be trusted. Commvault Cloud is the system of record for AI resilience."
Industry partners and customers quoted by Commvault pointed to the same concern: as AI agents become more widely used, organisations need a clearer view of what those agents are doing and a practical way to reverse changes when necessary.
"As we deploy AI agents across our organization, a key concern will be maintaining visibility and control over what these agents can access and how they interact with our sensitive data," said Marius Horja, CCoE Compute Architecture and Engineering with Emerson Electric. "Having the ability to view, manage, govern, and orchestrate our agent ecosystem in real time from a single platform will give us greater confidence to scale AI innovation without sacrificing safety or resiliency."
Lumen, which works with Commvault on cyber resilience offerings, also linked AI adoption to risk management and infrastructure control.
"As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, they need solutions that reduce risk while delivering real business value," said Sean Alexander, SVP Connected Ecosystem, Lumen. "Our partnership with Commvault, including our Lumen Validated Design for Cyber Resilience, brings together trusted cyber and AI resilience from Commvault with secure, scalable connectivity from Lumen-helping customers deploy with confidence and innovate safely in the agentic era."
Recovery focus
Commvault placed its strongest emphasis on recovery, particularly in systems where AI agents can make changes across multiple layers of technology, including applications, datasets, configurations and related dependencies.
"In agentic environments, agents mutate state across data, systems, and configurations in ways that compound fast and are hard to trace," said Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer, Commvault. "When something goes wrong, teams need to recover not just data, but the full stack - applications, agent configurations, and dependencies - back to a known good state. That's what AI Protect delivers," said Ahlawat.