How Vanta Helps Customers Build Secure and Compliant AI Products, with Christina Cacioppo, Co-founder and CEO, and Iccha Sethi, VP of Engineering

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.

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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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