Theta Lake Exec Talks AI, Partner Role in Compliance

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.