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 and marketing at Palo Alto Networks, Google, and Symantec. Caccia beforehand led product advertising and marketing at ArcSight by 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 growing a safety platform targeted on guaranteeing the protected 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 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 crew brings deep expertise in AI growth, reverse engineering, and multi-cloud Kubernetes deployment, addressing the vital 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 resolve?
Once we first began the corporate, we thought that safety groups can 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 downside was defending their staff’ use of different individuals’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 possibly much less horny than cyberattacks, it’s what safety and privateness groups truly wanted. They wanted visibility of what their staff had been doing with third-party AI, a method to implement acceptable use insurance policies, and a method to shield knowledge with out blocking use of that knowledge. In order that’s what we constructed.
Given your intensive 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 widespread issues I hear from CISOs right now is, “I don’t wish to be ‘Physician No’ in relation to AI; I wish to assist our staff 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 harking back to the dotcom-era, again when the Internet was a brand new and transformative expertise. Once 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 wished to be completely different.
What units WitnessAI other than different AI governance and safety platforms available in the market right now?
Nicely, 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 automotive. For those who actually wish 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 concentrate on theoretical scary assaults on a company’s AI mannequin. That could be a actual downside, however it’s a unique 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 quite a bit 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 threat administration.
How does WitnessAI steadiness the necessity for AI innovation with enterprise safety and compliance?
As I wrote earlier, we imagine that AI needs to be like magic – it might make it easier to do superb issues. With that in thoughts, we predict AI innovation and safety are linked. In case your staff can use AI safely, they are going to use it typically and you’ll pull forward. For those who apply the everyday safety mindset and lock it down, your competitor gained’t do this, and they’ll pull forward. Every part we do is about enabling protected adoption of AI. As one buyer informed 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 concerning 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 introduced, they usually inform us, “Your rivals are all about how scary AI is, and you’re the solely vendor that’s telling us how you can truly use it successfully.” Sundar Pichai at Google has mentioned that “AI may very well be extra profound than hearth,” and that’s an fascinating metaphor. Hearth will be extremely damaging, as we now have seen lately. However managed hearth could make metal, which accelerates innovation. Generally at WitnessAI we speak about creating the innovation that allows our prospects to securely direct AI “hearth” to create the equal of metal. Alternatively, if you happen to suppose 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 imagine that safely enabling AI is the objective. Simply to present you an instance, there are various knowledge loss prevention (DLP) instruments, it’s a expertise that’s been round ceaselessly. And other people attempt to apply DLP to AI use, and possibly 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 are able to 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 protected. 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 soak 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 crew has constructed a complete acceptable use coverage for AI, one which ensures the protection 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 method 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 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 advocate 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 similar to jailbreaks or undesirable behaviors out of your bots.
How does WitnessAI’s AI observability characteristic assist firms monitor 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 let you know the place these apps are positioned, the place they host their knowledge, 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 watch prompts and responses. We are able to classify prompts by threat 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 guaranteeing company AI compliance, and the way does WitnessAI streamline this course of?
Compliance means guaranteeing that your organization is following laws or insurance policies, and there are two elements to making sure compliance. The primary is that you need to have the ability to determine problematic exercise. For instance, I have to know that an worker is utilizing buyer knowledge in a means which may run afoul of a knowledge safety legislation. We do this with our observability platform. The second half is describing and imposing coverage towards that exercise. You don’t wish to merely know that buyer knowledge is leaking, you wish to cease it from leaking. So, we we have constructed a novel AI-specific coverage engine, Witness/CONTROL, that permits you to simply construct identification and intention-based insurance policies to guard knowledge, stop dangerous or unlawful responses, and many others. For instance, you may 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 achieve this, robotically redact any PII.” Straightforward to say, and with WitnessAI, straightforward to implement.
How does WitnessAI tackle issues round LLM jailbreaks and immediate injection assaults?
We’ve a hardcore AI analysis crew—actually sharp. Early on, they constructed a system to create artificial assault knowledge, along with pulling in broadly accessible coaching knowledge units. Consequently, we’ve benchmarked our immediate injection towards every part on the market, we’re over 99% efficient and repeatedly catch assaults that the fashions themselves miss.
In observe, most firms we converse with wish to begin with worker app governance, after which a bit later they roll out an AI buyer app primarily based on their inside knowledge. So, they use Witness to guard their individuals, then they activate the immediate injection firewall. One system, one constant method to construct insurance policies, straightforward to scale.
What are your long-term objectives 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 shall be to deal with app to app, i.e agentic AI. We’ve designed the APIs in our platform to work equally properly with each brokers and people. Past that, we imagine we’ve constructed a brand new method 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.