The role of the DPO can be a solitary one, or so the 2024 survey by the Confederation of European Data Protection Organisations indicates. Based on input from over a thousand DPOs, the survey found that 42% of DPOs work alone, a further 19% only having one “support person”. This, accompanied by the increasing demands of the role means that even where the DPO has a privacy team to rely on, finding ways to spread the responsibility for data protection compliance throughout an organisation is only becoming more important. Anecdotally we are aware that privacy teams are now being tasked with responsibility for AI compliance, something which seems to be a wider trend as indicated by the survey on the DPO’s role in relation to AI governance recently launched by France’s Data Protection Authority, the CNIL.