Rick Caccia, CEO and Co-Founding father of WitnessAI, has in depth expertise in launching safety and compliance merchandise. He has held management roles in product and advertising at Palo Alto Networks, Google, and Symantec. Caccia beforehand led product advertising at ArcSight by its IPO and subsequent operations as a public firm and served as the primary Chief Advertising and marketing Officer at Exabeam. He holds a number of levels from the College of California, Berkeley.
WitnessAI is growing a safety platform targeted on guaranteeing the secure and safe use of AI in enterprises. With every main technological shift—reminiscent of net, cellular, and cloud computing—new safety challenges emerge, creating alternatives for business leaders to emerge. AI represents the following frontier on this evolution.
The corporate goals to determine itself as a pacesetter in AI safety by combining experience in machine studying, cybersecurity, and large-scale cloud operations. Its staff brings deep expertise in AI improvement, reverse engineering, and multi-cloud Kubernetes deployment, addressing the crucial challenges of securing AI-driven applied sciences.
What impressed you to co-found WitnessAI, and what key challenges in AI governance and safety had been you aiming to unravel?
Once we first began the corporate, we thought that safety groups could be involved about assaults on their inside AI fashions. As an alternative, the primary 15 CISOs we spoke with mentioned the alternative, that widespread company LLM rollout was a great distance off, however the pressing drawback was defending their workers’ use of different folks’s AI apps. We took a step again and noticed that the issue wasn’t heading off scary cyberattacks, it was safely enabling corporations to make use of AI productively. Whereas governance possibly much less horny than cyberattacks, it’s what safety and privateness groups truly wanted. They wanted visibility of what their workers had been doing with third-party AI, a solution to implement acceptable use insurance policies, and a solution to shield information with out blocking use of that information. In order that’s what we constructed.
Given your in depth expertise at Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and different cybersecurity corporations, how did these roles affect your strategy to constructing WitnessAI?
I’ve spoken with many CISOs over time. One of the frequent issues I hear from CISOs at present is, “I don’t need to be ‘Physician No’ in terms of AI; I need to assist our workers use it to be higher.” As somebody who has labored with cybersecurity distributors for a very long time, it is a very totally different assertion. It’s extra harking back to the dotcom-era, again when the Net was a brand new and transformative expertise. Once we constructed WitnessAI, we particularly began with product capabilities that helped clients undertake AI safely; our message was that these things is like magic and naturally everybody needs to expertise magic. I believe that safety corporations are too fast to play the worry card, and we needed to be totally different.
What units WitnessAI other than different AI governance and safety platforms out there at present?
Properly, for one factor, most different distributors within the house are targeted totally on the safety half, and never on the governance half. To me, governance is just like the brakes on a automobile. In case you actually need to get someplace shortly, you want efficient brakes along with a strong engine. Nobody goes to drive a Ferrari very quick if it has no brakes. On this case, your organization utilizing AI is the Ferrari, and WitnessAI is the brakes and steering wheel.
In distinction, most of our rivals give attention to theoretical scary assaults on a company’s AI mannequin. That could be a actual drawback, however it’s a special drawback than getting visibility and management over how my workers are utilizing any of the 5,000+ AI apps already on the web. It’s rather a lot simpler for us so as to add an AI firewall (and we now have) than it’s for the AI firewall distributors so as to add efficient governance and danger administration.
How does WitnessAI steadiness the necessity for AI innovation with enterprise safety and compliance?
As I wrote earlier, we consider that AI needs to be like magic – it will probably show you how to do superb issues. With that in thoughts, we predict AI innovation and safety are linked. In case your workers can use AI safely, they are going to use it usually and you’ll pull forward. In case you apply the everyday safety mindset and lock it down, your competitor received’t do this, and they’ll pull forward. All the things we do is about enabling secure adoption of AI. As one buyer advised me, “These things is magic, however most distributors deal with it prefer it was black magic, scary and one thing to worry.” At WitnessAI, we’re serving to to allow the magic.
Are you able to discuss concerning the firm’s core philosophy concerning AI governance—do you see AI safety as an enabler moderately than a restriction?
We recurrently have CISOs come as much as us at occasions the place we now have offered, and so they inform us, “Your rivals are all about how scary AI is, and you’re the solely vendor that’s telling us easy methods to truly use it successfully.” Sundar Pichai at Google has mentioned that “AI could possibly be extra profound than hearth,” and that’s an fascinating metaphor. Hearth could be extremely damaging, as we now have seen not too long ago. However managed hearth could make metal, which accelerates innovation. Generally at WitnessAI we speak about creating the innovation that allows our clients to soundly direct AI “hearth” to create the equal of metal. Alternatively, in case you assume AI is akin to magic, then maybe our objective is to present you a magic wand, to direct and management it.
In both case, we completely consider that safely enabling AI is the objective. Simply to present you an instance, there are various information loss prevention (DLP) instruments, it’s a expertise that’s been round eternally. And folks attempt to apply DLP to AI use, and possibly the DLP browser plug in sees that you’ve typed in an extended immediate asking for assist together with your work, and that immediate advertently has a buyer ID quantity in it. What occurs? The DLP product blocks the immediate from going out, and also you by no means get a solution. That’s restriction. As an alternative, with WItnessAI, we will determine the identical quantity, and silently and surgically redact it on the fly, after which unredact it within the AI response, so that you just get a helpful reply whereas additionally holding your information secure. That’s enablement.
What are the largest dangers enterprises face when deploying generative AI, and the way does WitnessAI mitigate them?
The primary is visibility. Many individuals are shocked to be taught that the AI utility universe isn’t simply ChatGPT and now DeepSeek; there are actually 1000’s of AI apps on the web and enterprises soak up dangers from workers utilizing these apps, so step one is getting visibility: which AI apps are my workers utilizing, what are they doing with these apps, and is it dangerous?
The second is management. Your authorized staff has constructed a complete acceptable use coverage for AI, one which ensures the security of buyer information, citizen information, mental property, in addition to worker security. How will you implement this coverage? Is it in your endpoint safety product? In your firewall? In your VPN? In your cloud? What if they’re all from totally different distributors? So, you want a solution to outline and implement acceptable use coverage that’s constant throughout AI fashions, apps, clouds, and safety merchandise.
The third is safety of your individual apps. In 2025, we’ll see a lot quicker adoption of LLMs inside enterprises, after which quicker rollout of chat apps powered by these LLMs. So, enterprises want to verify not solely that the apps are protected, but additionally that the apps don’t say “dumb” issues, like suggest a competitor.
We tackle all three. We offer visibility into which apps individuals are accessing, how they’re utilizing these apps, coverage that’s primarily based on who you might be and what you are attempting to do, and really efficient instruments for stopping assaults reminiscent of jailbreaks or undesirable behaviors out of your bots.
How does WitnessAI’s AI observability characteristic assist corporations monitor worker AI utilization and forestall “shadow AI” dangers?
WitnessAI connects to your community simply and silently builds a catalog of each AI app (and there are actually 1000’s of them on the web) that your workers’ entry. We let you know the place these apps are situated, the place they host their information, and many others so that you just perceive how dangerous these apps are. You may activate dialog visibility, the place we use deep packet inspection to look at prompts and responses. We will classify prompts by danger and by intent. Intent could be “write code” or “write a company contract.” It’s essential as a result of we then allow you to write intent-based coverage controls.
What position does AI coverage enforcement play in guaranteeing company AI compliance, and the way does WitnessAI streamline this course of?
Compliance means guaranteeing that your organization is following rules or insurance policies, and there are two components to making sure compliance. The primary is that you should be capable to determine problematic exercise. For instance, I must know that an worker is utilizing buyer information in a approach which may run afoul of an information safety regulation. We do this with our observability platform. The second half is describing and imposing coverage towards that exercise. You don’t need to merely know that buyer information is leaking, you need to cease it from leaking. So, we we have constructed a singular AI-specific coverage engine, Witness/CONTROL, that permits you to simply construct identification and intention-based insurance policies to guard information, stop dangerous or unlawful responses, and many others. For instance, you possibly can construct a coverage that claims one thing like, “Solely our authorized division can use ChatGPT to jot down company contracts, and in the event that they accomplish that, robotically redact any PII.” Simple to say, and with WitnessAI, simple to implement.
How does WitnessAI tackle issues round LLM jailbreaks and immediate injection assaults?
We have now a hardcore AI analysis staff—actually sharp. Early on, they constructed a system to create artificial assault information, along with pulling in extensively out there coaching information units. Because of this, we’ve benchmarked our immediate injection towards every part on the market, we’re over 99% efficient and recurrently catch assaults that the fashions themselves miss.
In apply, most corporations we communicate with need to begin with worker app governance, after which a bit later they roll out an AI buyer app primarily based on their inside information. So, they use Witness to guard their folks, then they activate the immediate injection firewall. One system, one constant solution to construct insurance policies, simple to scale.
What are your long-term objectives for WitnessAI, and the place do you see AI governance evolving within the subsequent 5 years?
Up to now, we’ve solely talked a couple of person-to-chat app mannequin right here. Our subsequent part shall be to deal with app to app, i.e agentic AI. We’ve designed the APIs in our platform to work equally effectively with each brokers and people. Past that, we consider we’ve constructed a brand new solution to get network-level visibility and coverage management within the AI age, and we’ll be rising the corporate with that in thoughts.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to WitnessAI.