AIP Podcast EP 61 - Safeguarding Organization-Wide Use of Generative AI with Liminal

This episode's guest, Michelle Eatherton, Chief Business Officer at Liminal shares how her team's platform helps organizations to safely empower employees to experience the productivity benefits of generative AI across any website, application, and platform while providing unparalleled data protection, observability, and governance. Liminal delivers robust security and a delightful user experience, so your enterprise can safely maximize the productivity benefits of generative AI.

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Website: https://www.liminal.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liminal-ai-security/

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Website: https://www.aipartnershipscorp.com/
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The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Regulated organizations require different security levels for all its actors, from security professionals to business managers. What if there was a simple user experience layer that helps you customize all your security levels for all the different layers across platforms, AI models and applications? In today's episode, we speak to Michelle Ethito, who is the key business officer at Liminal, which is funded by the world's leading regulator organizations to securely enable generative AI wherever work gets done. With Liminal, organizations can safely empower employees to experience productivity benefits of generative AI across any website, application, and platform, while providing unparalleled data protection, observability, and governance. Now, Michelle has had a distinguished career across big tech to startups, never strain far from where the money is. So today we learn more about an up-and-coming feature of the AI space which has captured the imaginations of the world, which is agent tech AI. Hey Michelle, what an honor. You've had quite a career. Let's walk our audience through that and tell us how you came to become the chief business officer of Liminal and how you're driving value across organizations through Liminal.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, it has been and it's been a ride the last 20 plus years. I started my career in the tech space really by, I suppose, accident, as many career choices often happen to work out. I was desperately interviewing for consulting jobs when I exited university and was unable to get a job as a consultant and stumbled into the tech arena, specifically around the partnerships and alliances part of the tech industry, and really have just never looked back. As you mentioned in your intro, I've worked at big tech companies like AWS and HubSpot. I was at a blockchain startup, I've been in kind of the medium tech space and really have done all kinds of different roles. As you mentioned, not far from the revenue sales, sales overlay, have been in the program strategy and operations side. And so as I was thinking about where I wanted to spend the next decade or so of the uh last bits of my career in this tech industry, when the AI wave came out, I knew I wanted to be a part of that. And a good friend of mine, we had met at Amazon, and the uh CEO and co-founder of Liminal had called me, talked about what they were building out, and I knew that it was such an opportunity to uh help bring my background and sort of that partnerships alliances focus being partner-led from the beginning in this space that was going to clearly be years and years in making and unfolding of um propelling us forward in this industry. So I knew I wanted to be part of it.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

That's amazing. And any organization would be thrilled to have you on their team. Tell me a little bit more about Limital. How did it get founded and what is the problem you're trying to solve for?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yeah, so well, you know, AI has been around for decades, a long time. There was a moment that we're all familiar with, and that's when GPT 3.5 hit the market, and suddenly it was everywhere. Everyone had access, everyone started started using it. I'm sure you and perhaps members of the audience may recall that ChatGPT became the fastest growing app in history. They reached 100 million users in something like 60 days, and it was just obvious that the train had left the station, that people were going to be using this technology. It was just too powerful to put back in the box, so to speak. But it was also apparent that data security concerns were going to be an issue too. And so our co-founders, the CEO and CTO of Leminole, and Stephen Aaron, at the time were working at FIS, a big regulated enterprise financial organization. And they could see that there were going to be organizations like the one that they were at where employees would want to use it, but there would be these concerns over how to do it securely. As you may know, the lifeblood of an LLM is data. You have to have data or the models can't exist, and so they're constantly ingesting new information to train and refine outputs. And this is challenging for enterprise organizations. They have sensitive data, they have responsibility to protect that data, whether that be, you know, customer information, whether it be uh regulatory concerns around health information or financial information, et cetera. And so our founding team recognized that organizations were going to face this challenge where they would want to and really have to leverage AI for the productivity gains, but they would have to do it in a way that was safe, secure, compliant. And so our co-founders spent um months and months and months talking to CISOs and CIOs and various knowledge workers across the regulated industry space and healthcare and financial services, and with that in mind, built a platform that gives security and governance capabilities that the security team would need, but then this amazing workflow and productivity access and enablement of AI that the knowledge workers or end users want. And so now we're deploying to some of the largest enterprises in the world and helping them say yes to generative AI, not shutting their workers down and giving them access, but empowering the security teams to have the right controls and observability over what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

That's amazing. And you've come such a long way since your early days in technology, Michelle. So, what's your strategy and what traction have you made in the time you've been at Liminal?

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Yeah, I mean, look, I think I think what's interesting about the tech space is it feels like every decade or so there are these waves that happen. When I entered my career in the early 2000s, we had just come um out of the infamous Y2K thing, which was kind of funny thinking about and looking back on that. But we were in this world when I when I entered the tech arena of virtualization and blade servers and you know, VMware was was on the rise, and there was this big wave happening there. It was changing the way people were working. About a decade later, uh in 2013, I went over to Amazon Web Services AWS, which at the time you knew something was happening there. I don't know that anyone knew how big it would actually turn out to be, but this was obviously this massive wave of um you know public cloud, and and then you know there was there was big data that followed after that, and now clearly we're in this AI wave. And I think I think what's common in all of these waves, and it's it's it's both maybe comforting in a predictable way and also exciting to figure out how to you know put the puzzle together is this wave of technology adoption cycle, and how you have you know this immediate fervor and hype, and then there's this disillusionment, and then it, you know, it's it's like one step forward, two steps back, and you and you keep moving through all of that. And um, throughout all of these waves that I've just mentioned, uh now in a biased way, I mentioned I've always been a channel partner alliances person. I think the role that partners and the ecosystem have played in all of these waves is super interesting. Um, and it's an area that I continue to lean into and want to bring to the forefront. And so when I had the opportunity to come over to Liminol, I was speaking with our CEO and I said, okay, we're going to be building this business in the space of security, it's in the space of data, we're we're going to be selling into regulated enterprise. That's partner land. There's no way we will do this with successfully without being partner and alliance focused from the very beginning. And um it'll be, I think, a differentiating part of our go-to-market motion. And so that's really been, I think, the um one of the biggest um, I guess, joys over the last year has been to see that strategy come to life and to apply all that experience over the last 21 years into how to build with an ecosystem mentality from the beginning. So many SaaS companies don't get that right. They wait five years or seven years or ten years and then they go try to figure this out. And so um, that's the traction that I feel really proud of at Liminal. We're we're building with an ecosystem mindset from the very beginning.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

That's uh very, very important to take note of. Um, and you know, regulated organizations are everywhere, and compliance is becoming an increasingly difficult and an uphill battle. Could you walk us through how Liminal has really moved the needle for enterprise companies in complying with the daily changes in the regulatory environment?

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Yeah, it is a lot. Um, and it's a really important part of all this, and it's a really important part of enterprises being able to actually move into production and true adoption. Um, you know, we know how uh critical the data security side is for regulated organization, and um, so we've committed to the adhering to the highest levels of compliance where uh we we think about HIPAA and we build and come out of the box HIPAA compliant. We have our SOC 2 type 2, we're finishing up high trust, we're road mapping NIST and uh ISO 2 uh 27001 is in progress. And so this has been this has been from the from the very early days important to how we've thought about building the company in terms of helping regulated organizations achieve that security posture that they want as it relates to AI. Um I mentioned earlier we had this premise from the beginning that blocking AI wasn't going to work. I used the phrase the train had left the station, and we believe that it creates a much riskier posture for organizations when they try to shut that down. Um we reference often and speak about there was a large state of work study that Microsoft released, and in that study, this is tens of thousands of workers, they they found that 75% of global knowledge workers use Gen AI and acknowledge that they're using it. 78% are bringing their own tools into the workplace. These are staggering numbers, and we know that that's happening, and we see it play out, and we know from the security professionals we talk to they see it as well. And so there's this explosion of bring your own AI or shadow AI, and it means that organizations have no control or visibility into how the data is actually being shared, by who, to which models, and from a regulatory perspective, that's really risky and it's a big problem. And so with Liminal, we provide that secure access to the tools that workers want, no matter what they are, no matter what modality, whether direct chatting in an application, in a browser, but we provide all of those attendance security controls that the companies need in order to make sure that they're adhering to all the latest compliance requirements.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

That's incredible information. And it looks like it's almost all the time we have for today, Michelle. So what's on the horizon for Liminal? What are you really, really getting excited about?

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Yeah, I think what's super exciting is it each month honestly feels like a year in this space right now. We're seeing incredible growth, but we're still just at the very beginning. I talked about how I have about a decade left of, you know, kind of this space, and then there's some other things I want to go off and do professionally. And to know that organizations are just at the beginning of their deployment steps and they're really just starting to see how Gen AI can benefit their workforce and their organization, that's the part that's so fun. That we're getting to be part of that, helping organizations say yes, helping them start to realize the benefit from just those very first low-lift, high impact use cases that don't even get into agents and connected data and all these things that everybody's still trying to figure out, which is a whole nother topic for another day of where that space is heading. Um, and so we we've got some clients that have been at this longer than we have, and working out with working with them to build out these amazing transform transformational use cases. That's what's so exciting, getting to watch it all evolve and be a part of that history.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

That's amazing. So, Michelle, well, thank you for joining us today. What a stormy career, and I'm really excited to hear more as I track your progress at Liminal. To all the listeners and subscribers on Spotify, YouTube, and LinkedIn, your support has been incredibly valuable to us and it continues to be. So don't forget to like, share, and follow us. It helps us so much more than you'll ever know. Once again, my name is Anne, your boss from Supercharged Lab on behalf of the AI Partnerships Corp. And I've been speaking to Michelle Etherton, who is from Liminal. Thank you for sharing your time with us.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Thank you.