Vanta helped create the automated security and compliance category—and now, they’re redefining it with AI.
In this episode, Christina Cacioppo (CEO & Co-Founder) and Iccha Sethi (VP of Engineering) join Barr Yaron to go deep on how AI is transforming the way Vanta builds products, evaluates models, and helps companies earn and demonstrate trust.
They cover:
- Why compliance is the perfect playground for AI
- How Vanta balances reliability, explainability, and scale
- What it takes to build golden datasets in high-stakes domains
- The real-world AI infrastructure behind Vanta AI
If you care about real AI product development—not just hype—this is a masterclass in doing it right.
🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives with leading AI builders and thinkers.
This episode is broken down into the following chapters:
00:00 – Intro
01:06 – Christina’s early entrepreneurial roots (Beanie Babies & all)
02:51 – From venture to founder: why Christina started Vanta
04:00 – What Vanta actually does
05:32 – Iccha on why she joined as VP of Engineering
07:09 – When Vanta started leaning into AI
08:33 – AI’s growing role in Vanta’s product roadmap
09:52 – How AI powers questionnaire automation
12:25 – Using LLMs to map policy docs to cloud configs
13:27 – Building trust: human-in-the-loop and explainability
16:03 – Vanta’s evaluation system for AI features
18:17 – How golden datasets are constructed (and maintained)
20:59 – Feedback loops: online eval from user behavior
22:43 – How model feedback informs product updates
23:38 – What Vanta wants from foundation models (but isn’t getting yet)
24:32 – Retrieval: how Vanta processes customer documents
27:13 – The hardest technical challenges in AI integration
29:41 – Internal adoption: how non-technical teams are using AI too
31:52 – Vanta’s centralized AI team & how other teams plug in
33:27 – Internal education: building AI intuition org-wide
34:31 – From prototype to production: experimentation culture
36:41 – Customer sentiment around AI in compliance workflows
38:22 – Enterprise buyers & the AI “kill switch”
39:06 – Personalized experiences as the future of trust
40:21 – How enterprises are approaching AI risk assessments
41:50 – What excites Iccha and Christina about the future of AI at Vanta
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