Theta Lake Exec Talks AI, Partner Role in Compliance
The pandemic spurred more violations and fines for organizations.
July 5, 2023
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Channel Futures: There is definite risk of employees using unmonitored communication channels. Can you think of an example or scenario where that might occur?
Theta Lake’s Anthony Cresci: A great one to point to which has created a lot of headlines is mobile messaging. For example, there were over $2 billion in fines to the top 11 banks. Having the right compliance controls in place means giving employees access to the tools they want to use, enabling them with those tools. If you don’t, employees are going to go into these unsanctioned or unmonitored channels and communicate, because that’s what their clients or customers or other stakeholders are asking for.
What happened was a lot of these organizations had policies that said you can’t use WhatsApp. People just went ahead and used it regardless. Because the organizations didn’t have them as a corporate sanctioned tool, they didn’t have the right compliance controls. They weren’t capturing those communications or monitoring those communications. They were in violation of those regulatory obligations, and that obviously meant significant fines for all these companies.
It’s making sure that you have the communication channels that employees are looking for and that you’re enabling all the ways that they can communicate. Then, you must make sure that the corporation has the right compliance controls around to enable employees to be more productive.
CF: What is the rationale organizations give for turning off certain tools or channels to begin with?
AC: All these vendors have been built for text-based content emails. For them, they don’t have the right integrations into all these platforms. And I would say for most of these, their existing compliance tools don’t have the right integrations that allow them to capture all of these things to turn that feature functionality on.
Then the other challenge coming up with is a lot of their architecture is built to support email. So, when they’re capturing something that’s a rich media, whether it’s something like chat, there are all these different things in there. If you’re creating these types of communications formats and into a format that’s not readily usable for e-discovery, surveillance, or investigations or review, it’s too taxing on employees. They can’t adopt it. And it’s creating more strain on teams. They don ’t have enough headcount to support that. They need a system that’s built for the smart communication platforms, which is the problem that we’re solving.
CF: Are we seeing more fines exacted on companies not following compliance protocols?
AC: Yes. Quite a bit more. And I think it was a couple of things. Mostly it was around the pandemic. All of a sudden, people needed to communicate in different channels. Now people were at home. They had their personal devices, they had other ones that they had access to. They wanted to communicate on these different channels. And there wasn’t that policing mechanism there. Also, not all the organizations had all the right compliance controls in place when they started adopting all these new technologies.
So suddenly you’re rolling out all these new tools to allow employees to be productive to communicate. Employees started doing things that were unsanctioned, unmonitored and exposed them. Now you see a lot more organizations be a little bit more strategic about how they deploy these tools in enabling their employees with the right technology and making sure compliance is a part of that discussion.
CF: Can you give a reason why two-thirds of employees are using unmonitored channels?
AC: I think what’s been interesting is there has been so much innovation that has gone into this space, and there are so many new platforms that are coming out consistently that allow people to collaborate better, be creative, be productive, work well together, generate ideas … and all these things are persistent. If you aren’t giving your employees the tools that they want, they’re going to go into tools that aren’t necessarily sanctioned or approved by the organization. It’s taking a more thoughtful approach to how your employees enable technology.
CF: So what are companies to do about unsanctioned tools? Is it up to them to update their technology or is Theta Lake offering them something to mitigate this problem?
AC: We work in a couple of different ways. Because the way that these things are architected, and built for text-based content, it’s a challenge to build a new architecture that supports all these different modalities, rich mediums of communication, like video or voice and everything else. However, there are ways that we can partner with a company’s legacy compliance tools and integrate with them.
Organizations don’t need to do a full rip-and-replace to start with us. We provide an easy way for them to not rip and replace everything that they have, but they keep compliant with all their modern communication, collaboration tools that they’re deploying inside their environments. We also provide a really nice way to link back to records within our system. It’s very easy way to engage with the content in our platform.
CF: Video is gaining more regulatory attention. How is video creating some of the greatest risk in terms of data privacy and employee misconduct?
AC: When you think about video, there’s not the regulatory obligation to capture the full video. If you’re going to do something bad, you’re probably going to do bad over video, which is a harder medium to police. And so that’s why there’s the highest risk happening there. However, the regulators are capturing more and more of these video meetings.
CF: How are you using AI technologies to monitor the video?
AC: When you think about video, we create a transcript of the voice when we first process it. We transcribe this text on screens, and we can do image object recognition. It’s very easy to then use all this AI machine learning language processing to tell you the points of time that are of interest to an organization that could potentially create those compliance risks. So processing, indexing all that information, using our detections, allows us to identify and alert organizations of potential risks. Our AI can look at 100% of the recordings, and then surface 2% or 3% of the ones you should examine for certain moments in time. It allows you to be more efficient when you’re doing investigations and review.
CF: Why should a partner find the evolving world of compliance relevant to the products that they sell to their customers?
AC: If you’re a channel partner that sells into regulated verticals, the organizations you sell to can’t adopt all of the UCC tools that they want without having the right compliance controls in place. If customers don’t have the right compliance controls in place when they’re trying to sell to other customers, then they just can’t deploy them. We talked about limited features, functionality, they’re getting a lesser ROI of the underlying UC platforms that they’re using today. Partners probably have smaller deal sizes, because they’re not selling the full suite of communications that they could be. Maybe they’re not selling it to the full set of users. They’ve just only signed to a subset of users because they’ve avoided the set that needs more compliance controls.
CF: Where does Theta Lake plan on taking its technology in the near future?
AC: Organizations have started releasing a ton of new capabilities and features around artificial intelligence, whether that’s summary of meetings or transcripts, or the use of large language models. They need a compliance partner that’s integrated into them. We can be in lockstep with our partners to integrate across the entire portfolio of modalities, mediums, features that they can use to communicate. More and more people are using critical communication infrastructure and then allowing them to deploy across their user base because they’ve got the right compliance partners. This is something you’ll see more of. There will be a continued focus on how we weave all these communications together.
CF: Where does Theta Lake plan on taking its technology in the near future?
AC: Organizations have started releasing a ton of new capabilities and features around artificial intelligence, whether that’s summary of meetings or transcripts, or the use of large language models. They need a compliance partner that’s integrated into them. We can be in lockstep with our partners to integrate across the entire portfolio of modalities, mediums, features that they can use to communicate. More and more people are using critical communication infrastructure and then allowing them to deploy across their user base because they’ve got the right compliance partners. This is something you’ll see more of. There will be a continued focus on how we weave all these communications together.
Theta Lake bills itself as the compliance and security solution that enables customers to unlock the power of modern communication tools, much of which surround unified communications. Although company officials don’t tout the numerous clients they work with, Theta Lake does say it handles compliance for five of the top 10 North American banks. With the backing of investors such as Zoom, Salesforce Ventures and Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, Theta Lake has won industry awards from Enterprise Connect (Channel Futures’ sister event), The Cyber and Best Tech Startups, to name a few.
Theta Lake’s Anthony Cresci
Theta Lake says it leverages “true” machine and deep learning, natural-language processing (NLP), and enhanced user experience to capture, archive, detect and surface risks across video, visual, voice, chat, document and email content.
However, Anthony Cresci, SVP of finance, business development and operations for Theta Lake, says success in compliance is more than a series of tasks the company carries out. It’s also about relaying a message that encourages a cultural shift among organizations and employees. For example, workers are likely to violate compliance mandates when they use communication channels not sanctioned by their employers. This begs the question: Why aren’t companies more flexible when it comes to providing a range of communication options?
Cresci tackles that point in this interview. He also addresses the role of AI in compliance, the greatest risks surrounding data privacy, and why channel partners should be concerned about compliance beyond the bottom line.
Theta Lake Tackling Compliance with AI
Channel Futures: AI is on the top of a lot of leaders’ minds. Reviewing Theta Lake’s technology, can you explain how AI and machine learning work for compliance monitoring?
Anthony Cresci: We built machine learning and AI and natural language processing into our technology. Most of our technology is proprietary. What we do is we index information like video, voice, chat, files documents, SMS, email — all the different modalities of communication.
Take video, for example. We’re one of 12 vendors that is certified for compliance recording for Microsoft Teams, so we can record the video meeting. We do things around automated speech recognition. We transcribe the voice of the conversation. If there’s any screen share or any text that’s on screen, we can transcribe that. We also do optical character recognition and transcribe that. That includes something that’s in a whiteboard, or it could be in a screen share, or it could be in a desktop share. We can even do things for our image object recognition.
So maybe there’s an application that you shouldn’t be sharing from Salesforce Workday, something that contains sensitive information.. Or maybe it’s a proprietary application inside the organization. We can detect the applications being shared. We can train AI to detect certain image or objects that would be compliance violations.
It’s going beyond the simple keyword matching. Transcripts are noisy. It’s detecting words that have similar meanings. It allows you to be more accurate and effective in detecting risk inside a document. We also put a document into an AI-assisted workflow to help streamline and create more efficiencies.
Read the rest of our Q&A with Cresci in the slideshow above.
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