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 and marketing at Palo Alto Networks, Google, and Symantec. Caccia beforehand led product advertising and marketing at ArcSight via 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 centered on making certain the secure and safe use of AI in enterprises. With every main technological shift—equivalent to 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 ascertain itself as a frontrunner in AI safety by combining experience in machine studying, cybersecurity, and large-scale cloud operations. Its workforce brings deep expertise in AI growth, reverse engineering, and multi-cloud Kubernetes deployment, addressing the essential 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 a substitute, the primary 15 CISOs we spoke with mentioned the alternative, that widespread company LLM rollout was a great distance off, however the pressing downside 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 firms to make use of AI productively. Whereas governance perhaps 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 knowledge with out blocking use of that knowledge. In order that’s what we constructed.
Given your in depth expertise at Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, and different cybersecurity companies, how did these roles affect your method to constructing WitnessAI?
I’ve spoken with many CISOs through the years. One of the crucial frequent issues I hear from CISOs right now is, “I don’t need to be ‘Physician No’ on the subject 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, this can be a very completely different assertion. It’s extra paying homage to the dotcom-era, again when the Internet was a brand new and transformative know-how. Once we constructed WitnessAI, we particularly began with product capabilities that helped prospects undertake AI safely; our message was that these items is like magic and naturally everybody desires to expertise magic. I feel that safety firms are too fast to play the worry card, and we needed to be completely different.
What units WitnessAI aside from different AI governance and safety platforms out there right now?
Nicely, for one factor, most different distributors within the area are centered totally on the safety half, and never on the governance half. To me, governance is just like the brakes on a automotive. If you happen to actually need to get someplace rapidly, you want efficient brakes along with a robust 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 concentrate on theoretical scary assaults on a company’s AI mannequin. That could be a actual downside, but it surely’s a unique downside than getting visibility and management over how my workers are utilizing any of the 5,000+ AI apps already on the web. It’s loads 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 imagine that AI ought to be like magic – it may well 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 may use it typically and you’ll pull forward. If you happen to apply the standard safety mindset and lock it down, your competitor received’t try this, and they’ll pull forward. All the things we do is about enabling secure adoption of AI. As one buyer instructed me, “These items 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 speak in regards to the firm’s core philosophy relating to AI governance—do you see AI safety as an enabler slightly than a restriction?
We repeatedly have CISOs come as much as us at occasions the place we now have offered, they usually inform us, “Your rivals are all about how scary AI is, and you’re the solely vendor that’s telling us learn how to truly use it successfully.” Sundar Pichai at Google has mentioned that “AI could possibly be extra profound than fireplace,” and that’s an attention-grabbing metaphor. Fireplace will be extremely damaging, as we now have seen lately. However managed fireplace could make metal, which accelerates innovation. Generally at WitnessAI we speak about creating the innovation that allows our prospects to securely direct AI “fireplace” to create the equal of metal. Alternatively, in case you assume AI is akin to magic, then maybe our aim is to provide you a magic wand, to direct and management it.
In both case, we completely imagine that safely enabling AI is the aim. Simply to provide you an instance, there are numerous knowledge loss prevention (DLP) instruments, it’s a know-how that’s been round perpetually. And other people attempt to apply DLP to AI use, and perhaps the DLP browser plug in sees that you’ve typed in a protracted immediate asking for assist along 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 a substitute, 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 maintaining your knowledge secure. That’s enablement.
What are the most important dangers enterprises face when deploying generative AI, and the way does WitnessAI mitigate them?
The primary is visibility. Many individuals are stunned to study 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 take in 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 workforce has constructed a complete acceptable use coverage for AI, one which ensures the security of buyer knowledge, citizen knowledge, 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 completely 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 personal apps. In 2025, we’ll see a lot sooner adoption of LLMs inside enterprises, after which sooner rollout of chat apps powered by these LLMs. So, enterprises want to verify not solely that the apps are protected, but in addition 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 based mostly on who you might be and what you are attempting to do, and really efficient instruments for stopping assaults equivalent to jailbreaks or undesirable behaviors out of your bots.
How does WitnessAI’s AI observability characteristic assist firms observe worker AI utilization and stop “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 inform you the place these apps are situated, the place they host their knowledge, and so on so that you just perceive how dangerous these apps are. You’ll be able to activate dialog visibility, the place we use deep packet inspection to look at prompts and responses. We are able to 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 function does AI coverage enforcement play in making certain company AI compliance, and the way does WitnessAI streamline this course of?
Compliance means making certain that your organization is following laws or insurance policies, and there are two elements to making sure compliance. The primary is that you should be capable of determine problematic exercise. For instance, I must know that an worker is utilizing buyer knowledge in a manner which may run afoul of an information safety legislation. We try this with our observability platform. The second half is describing and imposing coverage in opposition to that exercise. You don’t need to merely know that buyer knowledge is leaking, you need to cease it from leaking. So, we we have constructed a novel AI-specific coverage engine, Witness/CONTROL, that allows you to simply construct id and intention-based insurance policies to guard knowledge, stop dangerous or unlawful responses, and so on. For instance, you’ll be able to construct a coverage that claims one thing like, “Solely our authorized division can use ChatGPT to write down company contracts, and in the event that they achieve this, routinely 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’ve a hardcore AI analysis workforce—actually sharp. Early on, they constructed a system to create artificial assault knowledge, along with pulling in broadly accessible coaching knowledge units. In consequence, we’ve benchmarked our immediate injection in opposition to every part on the market, we’re over 99% efficient and repeatedly catch assaults that the fashions themselves miss.
In observe, most firms we communicate with need to begin with worker app governance, after which a bit later they roll out an AI buyer app based mostly on their inside knowledge. 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 targets for WitnessAI, and the place do you see AI governance evolving within the subsequent 5 years?
To this point, we’ve solely talked a couple of person-to-chat app mannequin right here. Our subsequent part will likely 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 imagine 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 good interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to WitnessAI.