Although they look fluffy and cute, llamas make excellent guard animals, which is why you might often spot the camel cousins standing proud in a field full of sheep. Naturally alert, llamas keep watch for predators encroaching on the paddock and make an alarm-like sound to ward off intruders. Their protective instincts are also why compliance software provider Vanta uses a llama as its mascot.
“It seemed appropriate for a security company, but not as on the nose as a dog,” Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo told me on a call recently.
Vanta has just published its latest State of Trust report, based on a survey of 2,500 “I.T. and business decision-makers across Australia, France, Germany, the U.K., and U.S.” Naturally, for a digital security company, the report considers “trust” primarily through the lens of data privacy, risk, and compliance. But Vanta’s survey provides some compelling data on how the IT community is tackling this year’s hottest topic: artificial intelligence.
Cacioppo says that “77% of the businesses surveyed are already using AI and machine learning for threat and anomaly detection,” reducing the tedium in a human compliance officer’s workload. There’s also a big role for generative AI in compliance, Cacioppo explains. The popular tool can be used to quickly convert policy documents into actionable code, for instance, or for auto-populating security questionnaires.
However, over half of Vanta’s survey respondents also worry that deploying AI will make secure data management more difficult, and that using generative AI, in particular, could erode customer trust.
“If you’ve used any of these models, the distrust kind of makes sense,” Cacioppo says. Generative AI programs are known to “hallucinate,” which is industry jargon for producing false results. Everyone will have seen ChatGPT provide incorrect answers to simple math problems, for example. But Cacioppo thinks the technology will improve and that, today, generative AI is good enough for providing first drafts of finished work.
“Maybe it’s a good first draft, maybe it’s a bad first draft, but it’s a first draft. And that’s easier to work from than a blank sheet of paper,” Cacioppo says. That means there will still be need for human workers to edit and proof check the work of AI, and that human touch will help maintain trust with customers.
Regulation might be another tool to help build trust in the budding AI space. Cacioppo says half the companies surveyed said they would feel more comfortable deploying AI if it were regulated, although she stops short of advocating for regulation herself.
Vanta, Cacioppo says, is “pro-responsible use” rather than pro-regulation, highlighting one of the greatest trust issues surrounding AI: Many companies developing AI tools believe they’re trustworthy enough to self-regulate.
Vanta is holding an industry conference on the future of trust in an AI world next week. No doubt the thorny topic of regulation will be teased out further there.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
IN OTHER NEWS
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Apple cancels Goldman’s credit
Apple is putting an end to its credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs, delivering another blow in the investment bank’s ill-fated attempt to push into the consumer banking space. In January of this year, Goldman CEO David Solomon said the partnership with Apple was “an interesting opportunity to experiment and try different things.” But quietly, the Journal says, the bank told Apple it was looking to offload the partnership.
Jack Ma re-emerges
Jack Ma urged Alibaba Group Holding to “correct its course” in a surprise internal memo last week. The once bombastic leader has remained relatively quiet since he criticized regulators in 2020 and suffered a prolonged backlash from the government, which compelled Ma to pull a multi-billion-dollar IPO and break up his goliath corporation into smaller entities. Ma appears to want his legacy company to refocus its efforts on AI.
G42 defends itself
G42 is at the forefront of the UAE’s drive to become a major player in AI. Controlled by the country’s national security advisor, the startup is signing deals around the world, working with technology companies in the U.S. including both Microsoft and OpenAI. But the startup is also under fire from the Biden administration for its ties to Chinese firms like Huawei. G42 CEO Peng Xiao responded to the controversy during the Fortune Global Forum in Abu Dhabi last Wednesday.
TRUST EXERCISE
“The data tells us that net-zero investments will have to increase enormously–by trillions of dollars each year–for the world to have any hope of meeting the 2050 target. Yet the single biggest obstacle to increasing those investments is…the fact that global asset values and capital allocations do not adequately reflect long-term climate risks and opportunities.”
COP28 is underway in Dubai, where leaders have gathered once again to push for progress on the 2015 Paris Agreement. Funding the green transition needed to meet those goals is still lacking, to the tune of some $3 trillion. MSCI CEO Henry Fernandez says investment will continue to lag until greater data management uncovers “the true long-term value” of assets. But investment strategies also need to change to value long-term returns over quarterly ones.
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