Transcend Launches Policy Engine: Business Rules, Applied at the Speed of AI

Business Wire

Transcend, the autonomous data decision platform trusted by Fortune 500 brands, today announced Policy Engine, a runtime API that turns every if/then a business runs on into a real-time data decision. With this launch, Transcend establishes a new category of enterprise technology—Data Decision Infrastructure—to unlock new growth and accelerate AI deployments at a critical moment, grounded in responsible data use.

Every AI initiative an enterprise ships depends on one question: can I use this data, right now, for this purpose? AI is consuming customer data faster than any IT check by hand , and analysts see the gap widening. Gartner predicts that by 2030, half of AI agent deployment failures will be caused by insufficient runtime enforcement from AI governance platforms.¹ IDC forecasts that by 2030, up to 20% of G1000 organizations will face lawsuits, substantial fines, and CIO dismissals stemming from inadequate controls and governance of AI agents.²

Transcend understands writing the policy is not the hard part. Enforcing it everywhere data flows, at the speed AI demands, is an infrastructure problem, and it belongs with the CIOs and CTOs leading AI transformation.

Policy Engine is that layer. Any if/then statement becomes a real-time answer, whether it encodes a business policy, a customer preference, or a legal requirement. Every answer arrives in milliseconds and is logged with the reasoning behind it: an “allowed” from an explicit customer choice and an “allowed” from a jurisdiction’s default are never mistaken for the same thing.

In use with multiple Fortune 500 companies, Transcend’s Policy Engine runs securely through Sombra, and natively integrates with Transcend Preference Management, Consent, Data Discovery and Classification, and more. Policy Engine is also available as a standalone offering.

“As enterprises race to adopt AI, customer data is being used in more ways than ever before,” said Ben Brook, CEO and co-founder of Transcend. “But tech leaders are getting tangled in the complexity of data use rules, often waiting on legal sign-off for every new use case. Our customers tell us policy-as-code is the missing piece in the modern enterprise, and with Policy Engine, Data Decision Infrastructure finally exists to deliver it.”

Policy Engine extends Transcend’s industry-defining consent and preference architecture to the full set of rules an enterprise runs on, for example:

Cross-brand sharing: Decide whether an opt-in with one brand carries over to sister brands under a shared parent.
Channel-scoped consent support: Enforce email and text as independent permissions, so an opt-out on one channel never silently kills consent on the other.
Marketing business rules: Pause marketing or adjust pricing based on the company’s own policies, such as after a service failure or eligibility change.
Age-gating and restricted categories: Apply the distinct rules governing categories like alcohol, tobacco, and fertility products.
Jurisdiction-specific requirements: Check consent expiry windows and double opt-in where regulations demand it.

Each of these is powerful on its own. Policy Engine can combine any of them into a single real-time decision, not just a data-use check.

“We built Policy Engine as a runtime API because that’s where these decisions actually happen: inside the systems and agents that touch customer data, at the moment they act,” said Mike Farrell, CTO and co-founder of Transcend. “Enforcement cannot live in a policy document or a dashboard; it has to answer in real time, wherever the question originates. Engineering teams want to build products, not permissions plumbing, and Policy Engine takes that whole challenge off their hands.”

Enterprises can apply for early access to Policy Engine at transcend.io/platform/policy-engine.

About Transcend

Transcend is the only autonomous data decision platform that answers “can I use this data?” to scale customer growth. Fortune 500 companies and emerging category leaders leverage Transcend to encode complete data use permissions directly into the enterprise systems that process customer data, delivering a real-time source of truth for consent, preferences, and business rules. The result is superior data quality, ethical use that protects the brand, and audit-ready compliance at scale. With Transcend, companies can unlock revenue from AI, personalization, and other first-party data initiatives with confidence.

Founded in 2017 by Ben Brook (CEO) and Mike Farrell (CTO), Transcend is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company has been recognized as a Leader in IDC’s MarketScape for Worldwide Data Privacy Compliance Software and twice named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™.

[1] Gartner, “Gartner Announces Top Predictions for Data and Analytics in 2026,” press release, March 11, 2026.
[2] IDC, “IDC FutureScape 2026 Predictions Reveal the Rise of Agentic AI and a Turning Point in Enterprise Transformation,” October 2025.