The Fifth Elephant 2025 Annual Conference (18 & 19 July)

About the talk:
Handling Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is no longer just a compliance checkbox—it’s a core responsibility for engineers building data-intensive platforms. Whether you’re dealing with Aadhaar, PAN, credit card numbers, or biometric data, understanding how to protect sensitive information is crucial for maintaining user trust and staying on the right side of privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.

This session will start by demystifying PII—what qualifies, why it matters, and how misuse or exposure can impact your systems and business. We’ll walk through the two primary protection mechanisms: encryption and tokenization, and explain how to choose between them based on your product’s needs.

We’ll then take it further, into the LLMs and agentic systems world. With non-deterministic behavior, dynamic context switching, and autonomous tool use, these systems introduce new privacy risks that traditional PII protection strategies may not fully cover. We’ll explore what it takes to adapt your data protection strategies when building with Generative AI and multi-agent architectures, and how to stay vigilant when giving AI access to sensitive datasets.

If time permits, we will cover a real-world case study of a global company’s architecture will highlight how they designed for privacy and security from the ground up, especially in a public cloud environment.

Takeaways from the session:

• Learn a practical decision-making framework to choose between encryption and tokenization for protecting PII data in your systems.
• Understand the new challenges of handling PII when building LLM-based or agentic systems, and how to design your architecture to prevent data leaks or misuse.

Who this is for?

This session is ideal for software engineers, architects, platform engineers, MLOps professionals, and product teams building data pipelines, cloud platforms, or AI-enabled systems—especially those working with sensitive data or exploring GenAI and multi-agent workflows.

About Me:

I work as a Solution Consultant at Sahaj.ai. At Sahaj, I am learning to build technology platforms with extreme programming practice and work in high-trust and accountability technology teams.

I have 16 years of Software Engineering experience focussed on Tech Consulting and implementation and building strong technology teams. I have worked on Distributed systems, and traditional monolith platforms and built products on top of Eclipse Platform. I have diverse experience in Software Engineering - building tech platforms dealing with PII Data and requiring regulatory compliance, delivery management, customer relationship management, and presales.

LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyadarshanpatil/

References:

1. Blog link - https://medium.com/inspiredbrilliance/building-secure-systems-with-pii-data-protection-techniques-part-i-ac9a1119cbde
2. My toastmaster speech video - https://youtu.be/V6mbhpsWSCg?si=OTneczv2c-rB6qLS
3. PPT Link for my DevDay Hyderabad Talk. I would be updating the ppt to make it shorter for 30 min talk and cover parts about Data Security in context of LLMs & Multi-agent system - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hseQb1VEiT-GrGgMww3NSiMCM-fczCydkTAkA-wbw74/edit?usp=sharing