How Should Private Equity Firms Approach Data Governance When Deploying Copilot?

When supporting private equity clients with Copilot rollouts, we focus on two core areas of data governance:

1. Protecting Sensitive Information
   This includes personal data – such as passport details, driving licences, or health records – as well as commercially sensitive material that should only be accessible to authorised individuals. Ensuring this data is properly secured and that users understand its sensitivity is essential.
2. Unlocking Organisational Knowledge
   This is the data that underpins your firm’s intellectual capital – investment memos, deal notes, sector insights, and more. For Copilot to deliver real value, it needs access to this content so it can surface and repurpose it intelligently across use cases like pitch decks, due diligence summaries, or portfolio updates.

In practice, this means running a structured project that locks down the sensitive data appropriately and then reorganises the important data into a form that Copilot can see. Microsoft 365 offers a suite of tools to support this. We help firms identify sensitive data, locate where it lives, and apply appropriate controls – often using tools like sensitivity labels to make sure that the right people have access to it – and the wrong people don’t. This is mostly done in place, but sometimes creating new secure areas for document storage is needed. 

The result? Key stakeholders gain confidence that their data is protected, and users working with sensitive content (such as under NDAs) can clearly see the origin and usage guidelines of that data – visible directly within Copilot and the broader Microsoft 365 environment.

A similar process is done for the knowledge base with labelling and search used to make sure the important content is picked up by Copilot for reuse in particular use cases – whether it’s creating a pitch deck or an investment memo, Copilot (and any other AI tool, by the way!) needs to be able to easily find the appropriate content and bring it into your documents.

This isn’t just about productivity – it’s also about compliance. Sensitive data is often subject to regulatory scrutiny, so robust governance is critical. AI is accelerating the need for firms to treat data as a strategic asset – both to unlock value and to manage risk. That’s why leading private equity firms are taking data governance seriously as they adopt AI tools like Copilot. To get some help optimising usage of Copilot at your firm, please get in touch to arrange a discovery call: https://www.doherty.co.uk/contact-us/