Assessment run

The artificial intelligence behind Orbit Insights is not Orbit's own: the summaries are produced by a third-party foundation-model provider that Brightwater Consumer Brands has never contracted with, never reviewed and whose processing location it still cannot identify, even though the customer records involved cover people in forty countries. Orbit's contract lets it change features and the underlying model whenever it chooses, with notice only at the moment a change goes live, and Orbit confirms it does not tell customers about these changes in advance. Brightwater has no right to stay on a tested version, no advance notice, no change log and no way to test a new model before it reaches staff. The quarterly release proved the point: the model provider appeared on Orbit's subprocessor list the same day the feature switched on, and Brightwater found out only because a sales manager asked why summaries had started appearing.

Rating HIGH. Orbit and its model provider can change how the AI behaves at any time without telling Brightwater first, so any assurance you obtain today describes a system that may be different tomorrow.

What is being fed to the AI is not text that Brightwater staff chose to type in; it is existing CRM content assembled automatically by Orbit — customer email threads, call notes, contract terms, pricing and personal contact details for customers in forty countries. Brightwater never decided to send this material anywhere: the feature arrived switched on in a routine release and the platform began packaging records and transmitting them to the external model provider the same day that provider was added to the subprocessor list. There was no review of what would be sent, no opportunity to narrow the scope or redact sensitive fields, and no data protection impact assessment. Because the receiving party was never authorised in advance, the data flow by itself is a reportable data protection failure for Brightwater as the controller.

Rating MEDIUM. Sensitive customer and commercial records left Brightwater's contracted boundary in bulk without anyone at Brightwater choosing, scoping or approving it, which is an independently reportable compliance breach.

The feature creates new material from Brightwater's data: a written summary of each email thread and call note plus a suggested next action, saved back into the customer record. These summaries concentrate the most sensitive content — pricing, contract terms and named contact details — into a compact form, and they are produced by, and may be retained by, both Orbit and the external model provider. Nobody at Brightwater knows whether those summaries are kept for quality monitoring, for how long, who can read them or in which country they are stored, because the model provider was never assessed and no contract term covers retention of this output. The feature was on for every user, so this applies to every summary generated, not to a small sample.

Rating HIGH. Brightwater cannot say where copies of AI-written summaries of its customer data are held, how long they persist or under whose laws, so it cannot answer a regulator's or customer's question about them.

Orbit alone decides which customer records, email threads and call notes are pulled together and sent to the model for each summary, and Brightwater has no visibility into that selection at all. Orbit can change what is selected, how it is ranked, and which party in its chain performs that step, under the same contract clause that lets it change features at its discretion with notice only at release. Because the sales team reads the resulting summaries and suggested next actions as part of the customer record, a quiet change to what the pipeline includes — or quietly leaves out — would produce different, confident-looking conclusions with no signal to Brightwater and nothing to compare against. Brightwater also cannot bound what has already been sent, because it cannot see what the selection step chose.

Rating HIGH. Brightwater can neither verify nor limit what customer information is handed to the AI, and would not detect a change that silently alters the advice its sales staff act on.

Nothing in Orbit's disclosure tells Brightwater whether people — rather than only software — read its customer content once it reaches the model provider. Model providers commonly have staff sample prompts and outputs for quality, safety or abuse review, and because this provider was never assessed and no agreement rider was negotiated, Brightwater holds no commitment that no human sees its material, no limit on who may see it and no statement of where those reviewers are located. The content at risk is raw email threads and call notes containing named contact details, pricing and contract terms for customers in forty countries. This exposure is inferred from the absence of any disclosed policy rather than evidenced, but Brightwater currently has no basis on which to rule it out.

Rating MEDIUM. Brightwater cannot tell a customer or regulator whether a stranger's staff have read their emails and call notes, because no one ever asked the question of the model provider.

The decisive decision in this whole episode was a settings decision that Brightwater did not make: Orbit shipped Orbit Insights switched on for every user, and the only control Brightwater has is to switch it off per tenant after the fact. Brightwater's own rule — that no AI service may be used until it has passed a governance review — was effectively overridden, and the governance record now says no AI service was adopted while an AI service was live in production across the business. The administration console did not proactively surface the change, so Brightwater had no monitoring that would have caught it; discovery came from a sales manager's question. Orbit applied the same default to its whole customer base at once, with no case-by-case decision and no opportunity to object.

Rating HIGH. Brightwater's AI governance policy can be overridden by a vendor release note, and its own compliance records will not show it happened.