Shashi Angadi, CTO of Exterro, reveals insights in an exclusive interview with SJUK, explaining how Exterro Intelligence leverages agentic AI to deliver faster, secure and fully defensible workflows for legal, privacy and compliance teams.

What was the driving motivation behind developing Exterro Intelligence and the Assist for Data capability?

Exterro Intelligence is the culmination of years of applying AI across legal, privacy and forensic workflows and it was built to solve multiple challenges our customers face.

On one hand, data volumes are exploding, tasks like document review, PII detection, breach analysis and investigations often stretch into days or weeks.

On the other hand, every process in these domains must be transparent, explainable and defensible under regulatory or courtroom scrutiny.

What gets examined is not just the final output, but how you got there, whether the process itself can be justified and defended.

Exterro Intelligence unifies these elements into a cohesive framework that applies the most appropriate AI to each workflow.

Its first core capability, Assist for Data, was designed to eliminate the traditional trade-off between speed and defensibility. 

Leveraging cloud infrastructure to handle today’s digital landscape coupled with Agentic AI, the system can accelerate workflows up to 400× faster than manual methods, while ensuring the work product is fully auditable, cited and validated with human oversight.

Apart from speed and efficiency the motivation behind EI is to provide a broader vision: To legal, privacy and security teams an AI platform that they can trust to meet demanding deadlines and rigorous enough to withstand everchanging regulatory and courtroom standards – always in a defensible manner.

In what ways does Exterro’s agentic AI framework reduce the cybersecurity and governance risks that organisations commonly face?

Many AI systems in the market depend on third-party LLM vendors like and requires data to leave the organisation’s-controlled environment introducing governance gaps and security risks.

Exterro Intelligence eliminates those risks by design.

The models are purpose-built and hosted entirely in-house, with no external APIs.

This means customer data never leaves the environment, reducing exposure and maintaining compliance with strict frameworks like SOC 2, HiTrust, GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP and TiSAX.

By controlling the full stack and embedding compliance from the ground up, Exterro Intelligence ensures organisations can adopt AI without introducing new data governance risks.

How does Exterro ensure that every output is validated, auditable and defensible? What checks and controls are built in?

Every AI-driven output in EI comes with a transparent chain of custody. That means three things:

1. Citations and traceability: Every result is tied back to the underlying source data. No orphaned answers, no unexplainable logic
2. Validation agents: Outputs are cross-checked by secondary agents that test consistency and flag low-confidence results before they ever reach a human reviewer
3. Audit trails: Every step is logged so regulators, courts or even internal compliance teams can reconstruct exactly how a decision was made

This is where our philosophy of defensibility by design comes in.

In litigation or regulatory reviews, it’s not enough to say, “The AI said so.”

You need to demonstrate how that output was reached and why it can be trusted.

Our controls ensure that customers never have to choose between speed and defensibility, they get both.

“Hallucinations” are a big concern with AI. How does Exterro prevent or mitigate hallucination in its system?

Hallucinations are addressed through built-in validation and human-in-the-loop oversight.

Every output includes citations, so users can verify results against the source.

When confidence falls below a defined threshold, results are automatically routed to validator agents or flagged for human review.

This layered approach reduces the risk of unverifiable outputs entering the workflow, ensuring that what the AI produces is explainable and defensible.

What makes Exterro’s models different from using third-party LLMs or generic AI models?

The difference is twofold: Purpose and control.

Exterro’s models are purpose-built for legal, forensics and compliance tasks such as privilege detection, sensitive data classification, anomaly flagging and custodian mapping.

They are designed not just for accuracy, but for explainability in regulated environments.

Equally important, Exterro hosts and secures these models in-house, without relying on OpenAI, Gemini or other third-party APIs.

This eliminates the risks of data transfer, hidden costs or unpredictable vendor changes and ensures customers retain full control over their data.

How does the Exterro approach align with or anticipate legal, regulatory and privacy requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, etc.)?

Exterro Intelligence was built with compliance frameworks at its core.

It is aligned with GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, FedRAMP, HiTrust and TiSAX and it is structured to meet emerging requirements such as the EU AI Act.

The system ensures human-in-the-loop oversight, audit trails and explainability, all of which are non-negotiable under these regulations.

By embedding these controls directly into the framework, Exterro Intelligence helps organisations stay prepared not just for today’s regulatory expectations, but for the heightened scrutiny regulators are beginning to apply to AI systems.

Could you tell us about the roadmap ahead, what new capabilities, features or use cases are you most excited about?

Assist for Data is the first agentic AI capability within the Exterro Intelligence framework, but it won’t be the last.

Today, there are eight domain-specific agents live and by the end of the year, that number will expand to 15+ agents.

These will extend into adjacent workflows in privacy, forensics and governance, ensuring that the same combination of speed, transparency and defensibility is available across the platform.

We’ve already seen what’s possible: A global enterprise recently processed millions of documents with a very high level of accuracy, saving huge costs while meeting litigation deadlines.

Expanding these agentic capabilities across more workflows is what excites us most, it’s about giving organisations the confidence that AI can be fast, secure and regulator-ready all at once.

Shashidhar Angadi

Shashi Angadi is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Exterro.

With over 27 years of experience in developing large-scale enterprise solutions, Shashi has been a key figure in driving the technological direction and innovation at Exterro since its inception in 2006.

In his role, Shashi oversees the end-to-end platform that Exterro offers, which helps corporations and their legal teams manage legal governance, risk and compliance processes.

His responsibilities include leading the technology product architecture, engineering activities and managing the overall technology infrastructure of the company.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Bangalore University and has pursued further education at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

Shashi is known for his expertise in cloud computing, software project management and enterprise software, which he leverages to maintain Exterro’s competitive edge.

His contributions have been instrumental in developing innovative solutions that address the complex needs of data risk management, digital forensics and cybersecurity compliance.