How CoSec and legal teams can securely open org-wide access to entity data with AI

Most teams overseeing entity compliance already use AI, but few trust it enough to act on its answers unsupervised.

Here's how a governed connection to a single-source-of-truth of entity data closes that gap, and opens secure, self-service access to every team that needs it.

As the custodians of corporate records, the corporate secretary (Cosec), general counsel and their legal operations teams hold one of the clearest views of risk and growth opportunity across an organization.

Yet, their full potential is often hindered by fragmented processes, siloed data and outdated workflows.

During a Diligent webinar, industry experts explored how digitized corporate records data can bridge the gap between legal, tax, finance, HR and risk teams.

That discussion pointed to a simple shift: When colleagues across departments can reach the same entity data directly, the team that sits closest to the data can spend less time answering one-off information requests and more time enabling faster, better-connected collaboration across the organization.

The question that raises is how can that access be opened up in a controlled and secure way?

Stretched teams, fragmented data and AI governance

Legal teams oversee vast amounts of corporate records data: director appointments, compliance deadlines, tax structures and more.

However, critical information is often spread across multiple systems, including PowerPoint, Excel, Google Drive and SharePoint.

This decentralized approach creates risks, inefficiencies and redundancies. When teams can't get a fast, reliable answer through official channels, they find workarounds. For instance, pasting corporate data into whatever AI tool is closest at hand, with no oversight of where that data goes. The fragmentation problem and the shadow AI problem are the same problem.

Key issues include:

• Data invisibility: Teams struggle to access real-time, accurate entity information.
• Manual workflows: Compliance and reporting remain time-intensive and error-prone.
• Siloed decision-making: Legal, tax, and finance teams lack a single source of truth, leading to inefficiencies.
• Gatekeeping by default: Without a governed way to reach entity data directly, legal and CoSec teams stay stuck fielding repeat requests instead of acting as strategic partners.
• Time lost to task-switching: Toggling between entity management software and whichever AI tool a team already uses for other work adds friction that slows down even simple questions.

Diligent's Global State of Legal Entity Compliance Benchmark Report, a survey of more than 300 company secretaries, general counsel and legal ops leaders across six regions, found that 74% say their scope has expanded in the last two years, while 63% say workload has outpaced team growth.

The result: 55% are still managing entity data in spreadsheets, Word documents or SharePoint, only 1 in 5 have a near real-time view of their compliance obligations, and 51% had a near-miss on a critical deadline last year.

Separately, Microsoft and LinkedIn's Work Trend Index found 78% of AI users choose general LLMs like ChatGPT to do work rather than wait for an approved option. The same shadow AI dynamic legal teams run into when there's no governed way to reach entity data directly.

The fix is entity management software purpose-built for corporate records that consolidates the data in one governed system, automates the workflows around it, and — through a connected AI layer — answers questions inside the apps and LLMs other teams already use, instead of requiring them to log into a new one.

Entity data: Self-service, without losing control

That connected AI layer in Diligent Entities runs on MCP (Model Context Protocol), a highly secure open standard for connecting AI tools to a system's underlying data.

It's what lets your colleagues from tax, finance and HR query entity data directly from LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude,  i.e. the tools they're already in instead of requesting it from legal or having to log into Diligent Entities.

The CoSec and legal team can open that door without losing control because of how the connection is built:

• It authenticates as the person asking, not a shared service account. The AI tool inherits that user's exact permissions and tenancy, i.e. the same access they'd have logging into Entities directly, no more and no less.
• Permissions can't be escalated. The AI tool only ever sees what the requesting user could already see inside Diligent Entities; a query can't reach beyond that person's existing access.
• Nothing is retained or used to train the public LLM itself. Whatever entity data passes through an LLM to answer a user query, stays scoped to that query; it isn't stored by the model provider or fed back into training it.
• Every query is authenticated, rate-limited and logged, giving legal and administrators a full, attributable record of who asked what, from where.

Permissions and audit trails solve who can ask and who's accountable for it, but that's only half of what makes teams hesitate to trust an AI-generated answer. The other half is whether the answer itself is right, and that's where most organizations are still stuck.

Diligent's benchmark report found 93% of entity compliance teams already use AI in some form, but only 36% are comfortable letting it act without human approval, with data quality (45%) and lack of trust in AI accuracy (43%) cited as the top two blockers.

MCP addresses both, because of what it's querying against, not just who's allowed to ask. Rather than generating an answer from a model's own general knowledge, it retrieves the answer directly from Diligent Entities' governed record; the same single source of entity truth the team already relies on for filings and reporting.

Every response also comes back with the source cited, so anyone can trace the answer back to the underlying record and validate it before acting on it.

Give every team direct, governed access to entity data

Ready to close the gap between legal, tax, finance, HR and risk?

Diligent Entities centralizes entity data in one governed system and now connects to the AI tools your teams already use through a secure MCP connection, so tax, finance, HR and risk can query current entity data themselves, under their own permissions, instead of filing a request with legal.

Request a demo today to see how you can turn fragmented entity data into a trusted source of governance intelligence and stay ahead of risk.