Rick Caccia, CEO and Co-Founding father of WitnessAI, has intensive 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 way of its IPO and subsequent operations as a public firm and served as the primary Chief Advertising Officer at Exabeam. He holds a number of levels from the College of California, Berkeley.
WitnessAI is creating a safety platform centered on making certain the secure and safe use of AI in enterprises. With every main technological shift—similar to net, cellular, and cloud computing—new safety challenges emerge, creating alternatives for trade leaders to emerge. AI represents the subsequent frontier on this evolution.
The corporate goals to ascertain itself as a pacesetter 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 have been you aiming to resolve?
After we first began the corporate, we thought that safety groups could be involved about assaults on their inner 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 downside was defending their staff’ use of different folks’s AI apps. We took a step again and noticed that the issue wasn’t warding off scary cyberattacks, it was safely enabling firms to make use of AI productively. Whereas governance perhaps much less attractive than cyberattacks, it’s what safety and privateness groups really wanted. They wanted visibility of what their staff have been doing with third-party AI, a strategy to implement acceptable use insurance policies, and a strategy to defend information with out blocking use of that information. In order that’s what we constructed.
Given your intensive 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 through the years. Probably the most frequent issues I hear from CISOs at this time is, “I don’t need to be ‘Physician No’ with regards to AI; I need to assist our staff use it to be higher.” As somebody who has labored with cybersecurity distributors for a very long time, it is a very completely different assertion. It’s extra paying homage to the dotcom-era, again when the Net was a brand new and transformative expertise. After we constructed WitnessAI, we particularly began with product capabilities that helped prospects undertake AI safely; our message was that these things is like magic and naturally everybody needs to expertise magic. I believe 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 at this time?
Nicely, for one factor, most different distributors within the house are centered totally on the safety half, and never on the governance half. To me, governance is just like the brakes on a automotive. Should you 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 give attention to theoretical scary assaults on a company’s AI mannequin. That may be a actual downside, nevertheless it’s a distinct downside than getting visibility and management over how my staff 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’ve got) 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 ought to be like magic – it might probably show you how to do wonderful issues. With that in thoughts, we predict AI innovation and safety are linked. In case your staff can use AI safely, they may use it usually and you’ll pull forward. Should you apply the everyday safety mindset and lock it down, your competitor gained’t do this, and they’re going to pull forward. All the pieces 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 in regards to the firm’s core philosophy concerning AI governance—do you see AI safety as an enabler slightly than a restriction?
We often have CISOs come as much as us at occasions the place we’ve got introduced, 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 really use it successfully.” Sundar Pichai at Google has mentioned that “AI might be extra profound than fireplace,” and that’s an attention-grabbing metaphor. Fireplace will be extremely damaging, as we’ve got seen just lately. However managed fireplace could make metal, which accelerates innovation. Typically at WitnessAI we speak about creating the innovation that allows our prospects to soundly direct AI “fireplace” to create the equal of metal. Alternatively, when you suppose AI is akin to magic, then maybe our purpose is to provide you a magic wand, to direct and management it.
In both case, we completely consider that safely enabling AI is the purpose. Simply to provide you an instance, there are various information loss prevention (DLP) instruments, it’s a expertise that’s been round endlessly. And other people attempt to apply DLP to AI use, and perhaps the DLP browser plug in sees that you’ve got 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 preserving your information 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 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 take up dangers from staff utilizing these apps, so step one is getting visibility: which AI apps are my staff 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 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 completely different distributors? So, you want a strategy 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 are going to see a lot sooner adoption of LLMs inside enterprises, after which sooner rollout of chat apps powered by these LLMs. So, enterprises want to ensure 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 persons are accessing, how they’re utilizing these apps, coverage that’s based mostly on who you’re and what you are attempting to do, and really efficient instruments for stopping assaults similar to jailbreaks or undesirable behaviors out of your bots.
How does WitnessAI’s AI observability function 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 staff’ entry. We inform you the place these apps are situated, the place they host their information, and so on so that you just perceive how dangerous these apps are. You possibly can 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 is perhaps “write code” or “write a company contract.” It’s necessary as a result of we then allow you to write intent-based coverage controls.
What position 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 will need to have the ability to determine problematic exercise. For instance, I have to know that an worker is utilizing buyer information in a manner which may run afoul of a knowledge safety legislation. We do 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 information is leaking, you need to cease it from leaking. So, we we have constructed a novel AI-specific coverage engine, Witness/CONTROL, that permits you to simply construct id and intention-based insurance policies to guard information, stop dangerous or unlawful responses, and so on. For instance, you possibly can 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 accomplish that, routinely redact any PII.” Straightforward to say, and with WitnessAI, straightforward to implement.
How does WitnessAI tackle considerations round LLM jailbreaks and immediate injection assaults?
We’ve got a hardcore AI analysis workforce—actually sharp. Early on, they constructed a system to create artificial assault information, along with pulling in extensively accessible coaching information units. Consequently, we’ve benchmarked our immediate injection in opposition to all the things on the market, we’re over 99% efficient and often catch assaults that the fashions themselves miss.
In follow, most firms we converse with need to begin with worker app governance, after which a bit later they roll out an AI buyer app based mostly on their inner information. So, they use Witness to guard their folks, then they activate the immediate injection firewall. One system, one constant strategy to construct insurance policies, straightforward to scale.
What are your long-term targets for WitnessAI, and the place do you see AI governance evolving within the subsequent 5 years?
Up to now, we’ve solely talked a few person-to-chat app mannequin right here. Our subsequent part can be to deal with app to app, i.e agentic AI. We’ve designed the APIs in our platform to work equally nicely with each brokers and people. Past that, we consider we’ve constructed a brand new strategy 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 be taught extra ought to go to WitnessAI.
