Unified communications and collaboration platforms were designed to make work simpler. But increasingly, many organizations are facing fast-moving compliance challenges they are still struggling to control.
According to a recent Metrigy study, many organizations are responding in ways that may actually increase risk.
Nearly 30 percent of companies surveyed said they block access to emerging applications or features to address compliance concerns. While this may appear cautious, the research suggests it often leads to poorer outcomes.
For UC leaders, the challenge is no longer whether compliance matters, but how to meet growing regulatory demands without undermining collaboration, productivity, and the business value of modern communications.
When Compliance Comes Too Late
One of the most common missteps organizations make is treating compliance as a downstream problem. UC platforms are selected, deployed, and widely adopted before supervision, recordkeeping, and retention requirements are fully considered. By the time gaps are identified, choices are limited.
“The thing that we see time and again is people not thinking about compliance, supervision, and recordkeeping early enough in their selection and implementation of UC solutions,” said Tim Ward, Product Marketing Specialist at Global Relay.
“Once those issues are identified later on, the number of options starts to diminish quite rapidly.”
Metrigy’s research highlights just how complex UC compliance has become.
Requirements now extend beyond simple archiving to include retention and destruction policies, eDiscovery readiness, data classification, privacy controls, and voice compliance. This applies not only to calls and messages, but also to meeting transcripts, summaries, files, shared documents, and AI-generated content.
When these considerations are bolted on after deployment, organizations are often forced to restrict features, delay rollouts, or exclude certain user groups. In highly regulated sectors such as financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and energy, those tradeoffs can directly impact how effectively employees serve customers and partners.
Why Blocking Features Rarely Reduces Risk
“The problem is that a lot of the things companies block are arguably the most useful components of the solution,” Ward explained, citing meeting recordings, transcriptions, and collaborative tools.
“Blocking too many features is going to increase the temptation for employees to find their own alternatives.”
That temptation has proven costly. Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, pointed to repeated enforcement actions tied to off-channel communications.
In the U.S. alone, regulators have issued fines totaling hundreds of millions of dollars after employees used unsanctioned apps such as WhatsApp and Signal to conduct business conversations.
“Because all of that was happening using non-approved applications, there was no recordkeeping, no capture, no archive,” Lazar said.
“We’ve seen at least half a dozen examples in the last five to seven years of these scenarios playing out.”
The data backs this up. Nearly 63 percent of organizations allow employees to use consumer messaging apps, and among those, almost two-thirds actively monitor usage. The numbers reflect a reality many leaders recognize: outright bans are difficult to enforce, particularly when employees are under time pressure or working across organizational boundaries.
AI Is Expanding the Compliance Surface Area
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the UC compliance challenge at a pace many organizations did not anticipate.
AI-driven transcription, summarization, content creation, translation, and agentic workflows are now embedded directly into collaboration platforms, generating vast volumes of regulated content.
“One of the biggest areas of concern we see is how companies capture AI-generated output,” Lazar said. “That includes meeting transcripts, summaries of messages, documents, even presentations and graphics.”
Accuracy, classification, and retention become more complex as AI-generated content scales. A flawed transcript or misclassified summary can introduce compliance risk just as easily as a missing record.
Metrigy’s research also highlights growing concern around data leakage and privacy gaps as AI tools gain access to broader swaths of enterprise data.
Voice compliance is evolving in parallel. While voice remains a critical business channel – 68.3 percent of Metrigy respondents say it will remain essential – AI-powered surveillance is changing how organizations monitor it.
Advanced tools can analyze larger volumes of voice communications and reduce false positives, but only if organizations invest in the right infrastructure.
The Real Cost of Non-Compliance
Non-compliance carries both regulatory and business risk. Regulatory penalties can include fines, civil judgments, and restrictions on operating in certain markets. In extreme cases, organizations may lose the ability to operate entirely.
While financial services firms have faced the most visible enforcement actions, global regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX extend exposure across industries and regions.
Business risk is often less visible but equally damaging. Data breaches, reputational harm, loss of customer trust, and declining employee confidence can all stem from weak compliance practices. For publicly traded companies, even a single incident can impact stock price and investor confidence. Metrigy notes that organizations with poor data protection reputations often struggle to attract partners and retain talent.
At the same time, the data collected for compliance purposes holds significant untapped value. “We’re capturing all this data from various conversation channels,” Lazar said.
“We can potentially use it to understand what’s happening in the organization.”
When analyzed responsibly, compliant data can surface customer issues, workflow bottlenecks, and emerging risks before they escalate. The difference between high-performing organizations and the rest lies in how strategically they use that data.
What High-ROI Organizations Do Differently
Metrigy’s research shows that organizations achieving above-average ROI from UC investments treat compliance as a foundational capability. These “success group” companies involve security, compliance, and risk teams early in application evaluation and purchasing. In Metrigy’s Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025 study, 66.7% of high-ROI organizations included these teams in app selection.
They also conduct regular audits and rely on centralized, third-party compliance platforms rather than fragmented, app-specific solutions. “In a multi-vendor environment, it generally requires some centralized repository and capture platform,” Lazar said. “That ensures you have consistent policies applied across all of your applications.”
This approach enables a unified view across voice, messaging, meetings, and approved consumer apps, reducing complexity while allowing organizations to adopt new tools without reopening the same compliance debates.
Staying Compliant Without Slowing the Business
The UC compliance crunch is intensifying as AI and new collaboration modalities reshape how work gets done. Organizations that succeed will be those that stop viewing compliance as a blocker and start treating it as an enabler.
By engaging compliance teams early, supporting emerging channels instead of banning them, and investing in scalable compliance platforms, businesses can reduce risk while preserving productivity.
As Ward summed it up, compliance is ultimately about balance: providing employees with the tools they need to do their jobs while meeting recordkeeping and supervision obligations.
