New report reveals privacy and compliance concerns are slowing access to the data needed to build, train, and scale AI systems
SAN FRANCISCO – Tonic.ai today released its new report, State of Data Privacy in AI Development, revealing that data privacy is no longer just a governance concern, but a growing blocker to AI development velocity.
Based on a Q1 2026 survey of 232 business and technical leaders, the report finds that while enterprise AI adoption is well underway, many organizations are struggling to move at the speed the current moment demands. As AI reshapes competitive dynamics across industries, the ability to build, iterate, and deploy faster has become a strategic imperative; and data privacy has emerged as the primary constraint holding teams back.
Among the report’s findings:
- 46.6% of respondents said data privacy, legal liability, or regulatory compliance is their top concern related to AI
- 52.1% said privacy or compliance concerns frequently or very frequently slow or block their ability to use unstructured data for model development
- 69.8% said privacy restrictions limit their organization’s ability to innovate with AI
- 33.6% said significant manual data preparation or redaction is the biggest impact of privacy concerns on AI projects
- Nearly 86% reported having at least one AI or machine learning system already in production
“AI progress is not being held back by a lack of ambition,” said Adam Kamor, Co-founder and Head of Engineering at Tonic.ai. “It’s being held back by the inability to safely access and use the data that would make AI systems more accurate, more useful, and more reflective of the real world. Privacy has become a velocity problem. The organizations that solve it will be the ones that scale AI faster.”
The report introduces what Tonic.ai calls the AI Data Access Maturity Curve, a framework that describes how organizations typically evolve from using structured data, to higher-value but harder-to-govern unstructured data, and ultimately toward privacy-safe and synthetic approaches that make AI development more scalable. The research suggests that many enterprises are currently stuck in the middle stage, where the most valuable data is also the most operationally difficult to use.
The research also surfaces a striking paradox: 94.9% of respondents are confident their use of internal data complies with current AI regulations; yet nearly 70% say privacy restrictions are still limiting their ability to innovate. Compliance, it turns out, is not the same as capability. Organizations may have the policies in place, but that hasn’t translated into the operational freedom AI teams need to move fast.
“Most organizations are not blocked from building AI systems. They’re blocked from scaling them,” Kamor added. “The challenge now is not whether teams want to use AI. It’s whether they can unlock the right data quickly enough, safely enough, and at the level of realism required for production.”
This shift is already underway. Nearly a third of respondents (31%) report using synthetic data tools extensively, and 54.3% are exploring them in limited or experimental ways; a signal that the industry is actively looking for a way out of the bottleneck. Organizations are moving beyond patching the problem with manual redaction and starting to treat privacy as something that can be engineered into the development process from the start.
AI is reshaping competitive advantage in real time, and the organizations that figure out how to safely unlock their data will be the ones that build better models, ship faster, and pull ahead. Those that don’t will keep losing ground to the operational friction that’s slowing them down; not because of lack of effort, but because they can’t access the data they need to act on it.
The full report, including detailed findings and methodology, is available for download here.
About Tonic.ai
Tonic.ai empowers developers while protecting customer privacy by enabling companies to create safe, synthetic versions of their data for use in software development, model training, and AI implementation. Founded in 2018, with offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, and London, the company is pioneering enterprise tools for data transformation, de-identification, synthesis, and subsetting, in pursuit of its mission to make data usable. Thousands of developers use data generated with Tonic on a daily basis to build their products faster in industries as wide ranging as healthcare, financial services, logistics, edtech, and e-commerce. Working with customers like eBay, Cigna, American Express, and Volvo, Tonic.ai innovates to advance its goal of advocating for the privacy of individuals while enabling companies to do their best work. For more information, visit https://www.tonic.ai or follow /tonicfakedata on LinkedIn.
