How Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions cut review time by up to 80%
A lean team replaced a patchwork of manual questionnaires and spreadsheets with Clearly AI, cutting review times by up to 80%, improving accuracy, and expanding security coverage without adding headcount.
50–80%
Reduction in review time across all assessment types
85%
of vendor assessments auto-completed from source documentation
300+
assessments annually
Story summary
Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions ships wireless infrastructure that enterprise customers depend on to keep their operations running. Behind every product feature, vendor relationship, and AI capability is a privacy and security team responsible for reviewing it before it reaches customers. Before Clearly AI, that meant manual questionnaires, months-long delays, and a patchwork of spreadsheets holding the process together. Now, the same team covers more ground in less time and is expanding the platform across the broader security organization.
About the customer
Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions (formerly Cradlepoint®, acquired by Ericsson in 2020) delivers purpose-built wireless infrastructure that keeps enterprise operations running reliably. Their solutions combine hardware, software orchestration, and a growing ecosystem of AI-powered applications to manage devices and policies across complex business environments.
In This Story
Employees
80,000+
Industry
Telecommunications
Location
Stockholm, Sweden
Use cases
Threat modeling automation
Security documentation generation
Privacy and compliance review automation
Risk and gap analysis
Cyber Resilience Act readiness
Reviews without a system
Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions ships new wireless capabilities at the pace enterprise customers demand. For every product feature, every new vendor, and every AI-enabled capability the company brings to market, the privacy, product security, and vendor review teams are responsible for clearing it before it ships.
Ashley Haynes, Senior Director of Privacy, Trust and AI Governance, built the privacy program from scratch. The tooling started with Excel and Word documents. The team eventually moved to a widely used privacy tool, but the core process stayed the same: issue a questionnaire, wait for business owners to respond, follow up with the ones who didn't, and manually review everything that came back.
Across teams sharing an engineering pipeline in their ticketing system, the same dynamic played out in different forms. No automation. No end-to-end visibility. No shared system of record.
The cost of waiting
The biggest friction point was not the review work itself. It was everything required to start it.
Before Clearly AI, every assessment depended on business owners filling out questionnaires accurately and on time. Most business owners are not privacy practitioners. A straightforward assessment could take them three to five hours to complete, or longer if they needed to contact their vendor for answers. If they were unfamiliar with the questions, the privacy team had to schedule time to walk them through it, review the responses manually, and coordinate with additional approvers if a DPO or security team sign-off was required.
For the privacy team, each review ran one to three hours. Product reviews could stretch from two weeks to a month depending on scope and complexity. Vendor privacy threshold assessments carried a 15-day SLA and still often ran long because intake sat with business owners for 30 days or more.
When reviews ran long, the effects moved downstream quickly. Contracts stalled while assessments sat incomplete. Projects missed start dates. In some cases, reviews fell behind the pace of the business. Managing records of processing could often be cumbersome.
Faster reviews, more reliable outcomes
There was no single moment that prompted the search for a solution. The privacy, product security, and vendor review teams were running separate programs with separate tools, all feeding into the same business pipeline, and none of them had automation that could keep up with the volume.
"As soon as I heard about Clearly AI, I had to know more,” shared Ashley. “The possibility for reducing the amount of time that my business owners spend on assessments as well as my internal team made that very attractive for me."
The platform fit into the team's existing environment from the start. It ingested vendor contracts, statements of work, and technical documentation as source material, replacing the questionnaire-dependent intake with analysis drawn from the actual documents, paired with the Clearly platform’s review workflows. Business owners stopped having to fill out most of the assessment. The team stopped chasing responses they could pull directly from the source.
An additional benefit emerged once all functions were working inside the same system. With Clearly AI, all teams operate from the same information and deliver a consistent answer to the business.
Accuracy beyond business owner guesswork
The reduction in review time was immediate, and larger than the team expected.
Ashley had anticipated a 20–25% reduction in review times. What the team actually saw was 50–80% across all assessment types. What once took hours now takes 30 minutes. So even though the volume of assessments remained the same, the burden of each one shrank.
Today, 85% of vendor assessments are completed from source documentation, without business owners filling out a single question.
"Since we've implemented Clearly AI, we've been able to obtain accurate information faster,” said Mariel Combs, Senior Privacy Program Manager. “We've been able to identify risks quickly and get review outcomes to the business in a timely fashion."
The accuracy of the underlying information improved alongside speed. The Clearly AI platform surfaces what vendor contracts and technical documentation actually say about data practices, not the business owner's interpretation of them, which previously often required additional back-and-forth to verify. The team can now validate their analysis against regulatory requirements in the same workflow, rather than cross-referencing them separately.
A foundation for what’s next
What started as a privacy tool became the foundation for a broader security program.
Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions originally deployed Clearly AI for privacy impact assessments and vendor privacy reviews. Within months, the platform expanded to product security, where the team now uses it to triage application security reviews across development teams.
With review cycle times decreased and accurate outputs that the team trusts, there is capacity that did not exist before. That capacity is now directed toward AI governance, regulatory readiness, and deeper integration with product development cycles.
Alec described the change directly, saying "Clearly AI has allowed us the ability to focus on additional strategic efforts, additional backlog of program building, capabilities that we want to do internally that we haven't had the time for with our day-to-day work.”
For Alec, the shift extends to the role itself. "I see the role of a privacy manager evolving to be more strategic going forward, implementing better privacy-by-design principles, better AI governance principles, and working in lockstep with business stakeholders across multiple teams instead of being in the weeds on manual reviews."
Built for teams that need to move faster without adding risk
Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions now covers privacy assessments, AI risk reviews, vendor risk, and product security with Clearly AI, faster and more accurately, with capacity freed up for the strategic work that matters. Clearly AI gave them the coverage their program required without requiring more headcount.
If your team is managing the same volume with the same constraints, let's talk.
*Results described herein reflect Ericsson's experience. Individual results may vary
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