The workforce gap in the U.S.’s cybersecurity industry is 1.2 million, according to the most recent study by The International Information System Security Certification Consortium.
This gap means that many cybersecurity workers are spread thin. Debra Baker, who has 30 years of experience in cybersecurity and 15 years of experience in compliance, said that filling out tedious Standard Information Gathering (SIG) forms rob these workers of valuable time.
Publicly traded companies use SIG forms to determine how well prospective third-party vendors protect information. For example, a publicly traded company may need accounting software. So, the company will send SIG forms to prospective third-party vendors that could provide the accounting software to vet their information protection systems.
These forms are of particular importance to younger companies because they have fewer resources to protect information and fill out these forms.
After pouring numerous hours into completing SIG forms, Baker reached out to her colleague Mike Addison, who has 40 years of experience in Machine Learning, to talk about automating the form-filling process using AI.
While working full-time jobs, Baker and Addison started Trusted AI Solutions, a Raleigh-based tech startup, and created their first product, CompliBot. The product will fill out SIG forms for cybersecurity employees, saving them valuable time and freeing them up to focus on other tasks.
“One of the companies we talked to was saying that the majority of their team was spending 70 or 80% of their time just on these forms and being reactive [to other security issues],” Baker said. “If they could get these forms automated, then they could be more proactive in their security program instead of being reactive.”
Baker will be pitching the startup at next week’s Venture Connect summit in Raleigh.
CompliBot’s automated SIG form completion feature is Trusted AI Solutions’ minimum viable product (MVP), according to Baker. Its added ability to answer questions, give explanations and cite its answers is what Baker believes will set the startup’s product apart from competitors.
Baker and Addison plan to eventually further augment CompliBot to enable it to act as a virtual Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Once CompliBot is functioning as a virtual CISO, it can play a critical cost-cutting role for companies, especially young startups with limited resources that would otherwise struggle to field a full compliance team.
Trusted AI Solutions’ CompliBot is garnering attention from companies on the Fortune 500 list, according to Baker. But Baker and Addison are still developing the CompliBot prototype, and they’ll have to do demonstrations with these companies before they become clients.
Baker said that finishing the CompliBot prototype so that it is ready for customer demos is the startup’s main focus for the next three months. From there, Baker and Addison hope to secure some funding so that Addison can work full time on Trusted AI Solutions. Both Baker and Addison work other full-time jobs in addition to working at Trusted AI Solutions.
Aside from funding from the Google Cloud startup program, which Baker said could be up to $100,000 annually, the co-founders have bootstrapped the startup. They’ll now seek grants from NC IDEA and equity funding from VCs and other investors at the Venture Connect summit to supplement the Google Cloud funding and accelerate growth.
