Holland & Barrett, one of the UK’s leading health and wellness retailers, has dramatically cut the time and effort required to process Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs), saving an estimated 3,000 hours annually with the help of Aiimi’s Workplace AI Platform.
Holland & Barrett saw an 83% year-on-year increase in DSARs – a data compliance challenge facing organisations across sectors. Thousands of hours were being spent on manually locating, assessing and redacting sensitive information from large volumes of unstructured data. Missing or mishandling these requests carries consequences. Failure to complete a DSAR can damage public trust and leave organisations in hot water with the ICO, risking fines of up to £17.5 million for non-compliance. The retailer needed a way to ensure the rigour of the process without sacrificing more time.
To tackle this challenge, Holland and Barrett implemented Aiimi’s Workplace AI Platform to create an end-to-end DSAR solution. Automating this process has increased confidence in the accuracy of DSARs and drastically reduced delivery times:
Before partnering with Aiimi, setting up a DSAR took on average a week. It now takes 15 minutes, a 95% reduction in effort
Delivery time on complex DSARs that would previously take four weeks, or even up to 90 days using the ICO’s extended deadline, now take on average a single week, with some being completed in a matter of hours
There has been a 98% reduction in effort required to rerun a DSAR – down from two weeks to less than an hour, as previous DSARs are retained on the system
This is set to save Holland & Barrett’s Data Protection team 3,000 hours every year, freeing up staff to tackle more valuable and strategic tasks. The retailer now has the ability to comb through huge volumes of data across multiple sources in minutes through a single solution.
Holland & Barrett can now return data that it can fully trust. Automated processes reduce opportunities for human error. Redaction of sensitive information, which was previously a time-consuming and awkward process, can be completed with a single click. Manual interaction with the process is now limited to verifying data, meaning that DSARs return information for the public which is even more accurate and reliable.
Building on the momentum of this partnership, Holland & Barrett will be continuing to work with Aiimi on rolling out the Workplace AIPlatform into other areas of the business. The platform can be used to pre-emptively flag data risks, increase data discovery capabilities and provide a wider scope for successful AI adoption by providing access to high-quality and complete data for AI use cases.
Steve Salvin, CEO and founder of Aiimi, comments: “Organisations everywhere are seeing a surge in disclosure requests as the public become more aware of their data rights. For data protection teams, meeting these requests has traditionally meant weeks of manual work. Harnessing AI to handle the heavy lifting frees people to focus on the areas of data protection that require judgement, context and human oversight – where they can deliver the most value.
“We’re excited to be working with Holland & Barrett to advance their data capabilities and look forward to exploring new ways to unlock value and empower teams with smarter, faster access to data.”
Hollie Mela, data protection officer, at Holland & Barrett, added: “Before using Aiimi’s platform, setting up a DSAR might have taken us a week. Now, we can run a request in a few minutes. The difference this has made to our delivery times is genuinely night and day. Instead of struggling against tight deadlines, the team now has the breathing room to focus on accuracy and rigour in the results. Most importantly, the platform delivers data we can trust – allowing us to provide data subjects with their information more quickly and reliably.”
