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 means 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 growing a safety platform targeted on making certain the secure and safe use of AI in enterprises. With every main technological shift—akin to internet, cell, and cloud computing—new safety challenges emerge, creating alternatives for business 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 staff 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 inner AI fashions. As an alternative, the primary 15 CISOs we spoke with stated the alternative, that widespread company LLM rollout was a great distance off, however the pressing drawback 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 corporations to make use of AI productively. Whereas governance perhaps much less attractive 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 option to implement acceptable use insurance policies, and a option 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 corporations, how did these roles affect your method to constructing WitnessAI?
I’ve spoken with many CISOs over time. One of the widespread issues I hear from CISOs immediately is, “I don’t wish to be ‘Physician No’ relating 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, it is 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 clients undertake AI safely; our message was that these things is like magic and naturally everybody desires to expertise magic. I feel that safety corporations are too fast to play the concern card, and we needed to be completely different.
What units WitnessAI aside from different AI governance and safety platforms available in the market immediately?
Properly, for one factor, most different distributors within the area are targeted 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 wish 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 corporation’s AI mannequin. That may be a actual drawback, however it’s a unique drawback than getting visibility and management over how my staff are utilizing any of the 5,000+ AI apps already on the web. It’s so much 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 threat administration.
How does WitnessAI stability the necessity for AI innovation with enterprise safety and compliance?
As I wrote earlier, we consider that AI must be like magic – it could possibly enable you 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 may use it typically and you’ll pull forward. If you happen to apply the standard safety mindset and lock it down, your competitor gained’t try this, and they’ll pull forward. The whole lot 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 concern.” 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 reasonably than a restriction?
We repeatedly have CISOs come as much as us at occasions the place we’ve got offered, they usually 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 stated that “AI may very well be extra profound than hearth,” and that’s an attention-grabbing metaphor. Hearth may be extremely damaging, as we’ve got seen lately. However managed hearth could make metal, which accelerates innovation. Generally at WitnessAI we discuss creating the innovation that allows our clients to securely direct AI “hearth” to create the equal of metal. Alternatively, should 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 numerous knowledge loss prevention (DLP) instruments, it’s a expertise that’s been round ceaselessly. And folks 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 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 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 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 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 staff 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 option 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 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 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 akin to jailbreaks or undesirable behaviors out of your bots.
How does WitnessAI’s AI observability function assist corporations 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 let you know the place these apps are situated, the place they host their knowledge, and many others so that you just perceive how dangerous these apps are. You possibly can 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 may be “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 need to be capable to determine problematic exercise. For instance, I have to know that an worker is utilizing buyer knowledge in a manner which may run afoul of an information safety regulation. We try 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 allows you to simply construct id and intention-based insurance policies to guard knowledge, forestall dangerous or unlawful responses, and many others. For instance, you’ll be able to construct a coverage that claims one thing like, “Solely our authorized division can use ChatGPT to put in writing company contracts, and in the event that they accomplish that, 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 now have a hardcore AI analysis staff—actually sharp. Early on, they constructed a system to create artificial assault knowledge, along with pulling in extensively out there coaching knowledge units. Because of this, 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 corporations we communicate with wish to begin with worker app governance, after which a bit later they roll out an AI buyer app based mostly on their inner knowledge. So, they use Witness to guard their folks, then they activate the immediate injection firewall. One system, one constant option 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?
Up to now, we’ve solely talked a few 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 option 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.
