AiThority Interview with Eric Sydell, PhD, Cofounder and CEO of Vero AI

Eric Sydell, PhD, Cofounder and CEO of Vero AI chats about Vero AI’s AI-native platform, top challenges surrounding regulatory compliance, fundamentals of robust GRC processes  and more in this interview:

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Hi Eric, take us through your tech and AI journey and tell us more about Vero AI

AI is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me, fundamentally, it is just data processing. AI techniques, from deep learning to generative AI and beyond, help us to understand data that we previously could not understand. A self-driving car pulls in a massive amount of environmental information to decide which direction to go. AI techniques are particularly good at dealing with unstructured and messy data. There have long been techniques researchers use to process and analyze those types of data, but they are laborious and often not overly useful. AI can process and make sense of vast amounts of information at a scale not previously possible.

In 1996, Carl Sagan described the scientific method as a “candle in the dark” that can illuminate the world around us. To me, AI offers such hope. We can use it to study not just the 20% of information that is quantitative, but the other 80% that is largely just collecting dust.

I’ve worked for decades in the tech space, and witnessed all manner of BS (or however you want to refer to it – bull, bologna, etc.) and useless solutions. Vero AI is my attempt to create a scaled method for finding objective truth in all types of data, and I hope we can help shine that candle in the dark to combat hype and BS and make human decisions better and more objective.

Also Read: AiThority Interview with Tina Tarquinio, VP, Product Management, IBM Z and LinuxONE

Please tell us more about Vero AI’s AI-native platform and how it’s helping enterprises harness the potential of AI while minimizing risk?

Organizations spend massive amounts of time reading, reviewing, and interpreting various forms of textual information – such as documents, manuals, technical reports, contracts, and more. This process is essential for ensuring that the details conform with relevant standards and understanding their implications for the business. However, most organizations simply can’t keep up with the volume of documentation they would ideally want to analyze in depth. Even when time permits, humans are not great at methodically reviewing every single line and objectively evaluating it.

AI gives us new ways to process and understand all this data, and we designed our platform to take advantage of this exciting new capability. Using the core intelligence of modern large language models (LLMs), we can break down and parse the meaning of individual words and phrases and map those to specific standards that our clients require. In this way, you can quickly obtain an exceptionally thorough and detailed analysis of large volumes of information. This allows a business to massively increase compliance and reduce risk while saving tremendous time and dollars.

How do most tech and B2B teams lag when it comes to regulatory compliance, what are some of the top challenge areas?

We live in a world with a tremendous and growing amount of legislation and regulation. For example, there are thousands of AI-related laws being developed globally. It is extremely difficult to keep track of all of these requirements, and this places organizations at enormous risks for noncompliance.

At the same time, and this often goes unnoticed, the majority of rules are quite basic in nature and designed to ensure that organizations are not unduly harming the world or individuals. There is often no requirement that a specific tool or process actually be effective.

Therefore, compliance is not enough. A top performing business must consider the actual effectiveness of its processes rather than simply ensuring compliance. Vero AI’s platform is designed to not only evaluate compliance on any standard but also to evaluate whether tools are having a positive impact on your organization.

What fundamentals make for a robust GRC process?

Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) is an organizational strategy to manage governance and risks while maintaining compliance with industry and government regulations. GRC can be a daunting process, especially for small and midsize businesses that may not have big staffs and budgets. Laws and regulations, especially around AI, are proliferating, and there are many in the works that organizations might wish to monitor, on top of those they are already subjected to.

Organizations need to review and understand relevant compliance elements and evaluate how their tools and processes conform. Smaller businesses might tend to avoid using cutting-edge technology for fear of violating rules they are not tracking, but this often decreases their ability to compete.

The good news is that automating technologies, including some powered by AI itself, can help to review, evaluate, and even continuously monitor compliance with current and even potential future standards. We are quickly moving towards a world in which AI-based monitoring can dramatically simplify compliance, allowing organizations of all sizes to use the latest tech without fear of non-compliance.

Can you talk about the future of AI and how it’s set to impact the growth of industries and business?

Fundamentally, AI is a technology that allows the world to process and understand data in new and exciting ways. To me, this is undoubtedly positive. It helps us to shine a light on the darkness and objectively study the world around us. This is especially true with unstructured and qualitative data such as text. Of course, what we do with that information can be either beneficial or harmful to the world and humanity.

As AI advances, it will be used to automate more and more of the intellectual labor that powers businesses. This will bring massive disruption and job loss. Organizations will save costs and increase efficiencies by using AI for tasks that were previously done by humans. In doing so, we must be prepared to grapple with hard issues about the roles and well-being of humans. Ideally, AI tech will be used to improve human lives, but this will not happen without conscious planning and oversight by the governments and business leaders of the world.

Also Read: The future is enterprise AI: welcome to workplace 5.0

Five AI innovators you’d like to shout out to for their unique features before we wrap up?

I’m guessing you don’t want me to mention my own company here (!) so these are some other tools I’ve been impressed with:

• Google’s Notebook LM: This is a pretty stunning frontier application of what LLMs can do from big tech. You can upload some files and ask it to create a podcast about the material, and it works amazingly well! Plus it will do a lot more, like combine and summarize the main points of whatever documents you give it.
• Perplexity: I use Perplexity every day, and I love how it elevates the traditional web search by creating a structured, clear response. My favorite aspect of Perplexity is that it clearly cites its sources, so you can check to verify and read more.
• Pika: Just plain fun! This is an AI image generator that takes photos and does remarkable things to them, such as cake-ifying, exploding, and levitating objects. Super addicting!
• Abridge: Medicine and healthcare are so in need of disruption, and AI tech is doing some amazing things. Abridge is an example of a company that is using AI to automate the drudgery of physician note taking, and ultimately these types of tools will help doctors not only work more efficiently, but also allow them to focus on actual patient care rather than administrative tasks.
• AlphaFold: This is another Google innovation, and also healthcare-related. AlphaFold was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2024, and it uses AI to study the structure of proteins. Essentially, it allows scientists to model proteins and figure out how they fit with other molecules. This is and will lead to tremendous drug advances. Companies like Cradle are working to commercialize these types of technologies.

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