Proofpoint this week launched an agentic AI solution for Human Communications Intelligence (HCI), with agents that look for signals of misconduct, AI misuse, and insider risk in real time across the dozens of channels where employees are communicating—UcaaS, mobile, and social. The intent is to empower organizations to act on human behavior before it becomes a compliance, security, or legal event.
Harry Labana, SVP and GM of DCG at Proofpoint, says the announcement comprises three elements.
The first is HCI, part of Proofpoint’s Digital Communications Governance (DCG) portfolio. “It’s a way to consistently capture all of the managed digital communications that a company may want to have, whether that’s Slack or Zoom or M365, or one of the other products,” explains Labana. Powered by Proofpoint’s Nuclei technology (which Proofpoint acquired earlier this year), intelligent agents autonomously assess conversations, flag risks as they emerge, and provide transparent reasoning for every action.
HCI’s agents integrate with Proofpoint Insider Threat Management (ITM), the second element of the solution. The agents correlate 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 take action.
‘’If you understand what [people] say, you have a much better indication about what they’re going to do and potentially prevent them [from doing it],” Labana says. He calls it a “feedback loop between communication and behavior.”
In addition, to meet the needs of regulated and highly litigious industries that require communications audits, the Proofpoint Supervision agent, the third part of the announcement, analyzes 100% of captured communications with advanced detection that understands tone, intent, shorthand, emojis, and even code snippets, across multiple languages. The intent is to reduce false positives and decrease the amount of manual review required.
“If you’re monitoring signals from email, from Teams chat, from Zoom and Slack and a multitude of other sources, because collaboration is becoming more diverse over time, it becomes very noisy. So this is where AI lends itself to reducing the false positives that that come up, and that can be done cost effectively now,” Labana says.
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.
What’s the Value Add for MSPs?
Labana says the agentic AI solution offers several value propositions for MSPs. For one, he says, “It enables MSPs to bring enterprise-grade governance to clients who couldn’t afford it before. SMB and midmarket clients are just as exposed as enterprises to regulatory fines, insider threats, and data loss. I think agentic makes compliance accessible to smaller organizations by reducing the cost and manual overhead of supervision.”
By adding new managed compliance and risk management to their Proofpoint security offerings, there’s potential for higher-margin recurring revenue, differentiation, and the ability to position themselves as trusted advisors who can help their clients interpret and act on communication risks in real time, he says.
“If a managed service provider can sell AI-driven supervision, insider risk monitoring, or they can provide regulatory reporting dashboards to those customers, I think that’s all revenue and service differentiation.”
Other Use Cases Down the Road
The Proofpoint solution also includes a custom agent. While identifying security risks and AI misuse are clear use cases, “We want our customers to experiment,” Labana says. “One of the most powerful databases that you have in the enterprise is what people are talking about in your managed communications and that provides tremendous insights that can provide risk signals, which we’ve geared this towards … But I think it opens up so many possibilities for us down the road.”
He points to business insights like sales team productivity or effective sales conversations. “I think what people are asking us for is insights into how people are communicating and behaving.”
Labana concludes, “For MSPs, there could be other insights that they could build with custom agents or custom insights. I think there’s a lot of potential there. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on that.”
