Vince Walden of Kona AI on the Digital Workforce, Agentic AI, and the Future of Compliance

Jeanniey Walden: We’re here with Vince Walden from Kona AI, a Covasant company, and we’re talking about something a little bit different, but just as important as all the conversations we’ve had around marketing, and that is the digital workforce. Everybody’s talking about AI and how it’s impacting their brands. How’s it impacting the workforce?

Vince Walden: It’s funny, there’s so much talk about AI at every conference. I made a New Year’s resolution this year to not demonstrate or talk about AI unless I could actually show it, because there’s way too much talk and not enough actual demonstration. And here we are, I’m not demonstrating, so I’m breaking my own rule. But workplace transformation is huge. At Kona AI, we are a risk and compliance transformation SaaS company, and what we’re building are digital assistants. Now what’s a digital assistant? It is a whole bunch of agentic AI agents working together around various tasks. For a compliance professional, it’s a digital assistant for that. For a finance or procurement professional, it’s a digital assistant for their day-to-day tasks. It’s not about replacing the human, it’s about giving them more and helping them do more with less. And these digital assistants are quite impressive given the technologies with OpenAI, Claude, and Google Gemini. It’s amazing what we can do for a lot of the mundane, repetitive tasks so the workforce can focus on the value-added work.

Jeanniey Walden: You talk a lot about these digital assistants for teams throughout risk and compliance. Are they replacing the teams people have, supplementing them, or just automating the lower-level work that takes people’s time?

Vince Walden: The honest answer is a little bit of everything. However, we are not seeing reductions in staff. We’re not seeing a lot of new hires, especially at the lower levels, because a lot of those can be looked at with digital assistants. The key, regardless of your industry or business sector, is that if you’ve got ten or twenty people doing a repetitive task on the keyboard over and over again, that is a ripe opportunity for agentic AI and the digital assistants that support it. Regardless of your industry, if you’re doing a repetitive task, you really need to think about how agentic AI can be used to improve productivity.

Jeanniey Walden: From a compliance standpoint, the focus on brand health, brand security, and workplace compliance has a lot of elements to it, and I know a lot of compliance leaders are questioning how to best adopt AI. What three pieces of advice do you give a compliance leader on what they should be doing with AI immediately?

Vince Walden: First, start with your risk assessment and focus on the low-hanging fruit. There’s no sense in doing AI for the purpose of AI. It’s got to add value, do something, and be based on something important to the CEO, the CFO, or the culture of the company. So start with your risk assessment and do something that matters but isn’t too overwhelming. Don’t boil the ocean. The second thing is to shift your program from a reactive response type of program to a proactive, continuous-controls program. There are a lot of things you can do, like building the policies into the code and building the rules and controls into the actual agents, so you don’t need to audit them, it’s just part of the code. So look forward, don’t just look back. And the third is keep it simple. Think about return on investment, finding hidden money, doing more with less, and enabling your team with these digital assistants. Gone are the days when you can go to your CFO and ask for ten more people to help with a process. The first thing that CFO is going to ask the compliance officer is, “Have you considered digital assistants and agentic AI before I go approve these ten new people?” And you’d better have that answer before you go.

Jeanniey Walden: That’s a great point with a CFO. How does a risk and compliance leader have a conversation to show the value of a digital assistant to a CFO?

Vince Walden: Business is moving fast, and the controls we had in place yesterday are not sufficient going forward. The business landscape is constantly changing, new risks are emerging, and your people are using agents and digital assistants at paces faster than you can keep up with from a governance perspective. You need to be more flexible and think differently. Having people chase responses, controls, or failures isn’t going to work anymore. You need these agents working 24/7 with policy in the code, as I mentioned, to flag what’s not responsive or what’s an issue proactively, not reactively. You have to do it to keep up with the business and run an effective compliance program aligned to your policies.

Jeanniey Walden: At Kona AI you work with so many businesses and see everything. You’re seeing companies use digital assistants to find hidden money, identify issues or opportunities in employee engagement studies, and build their business in ways they couldn’t before. What do you think is going to happen over the next six months for the compliance leader? Do you think they’ll move up inside the business as an area that establishes trust between employee and employer?

Vince Walden: I do. I’m an optimist by nature, but I’m excited for our industry. It’s a really good time to be a risk and compliance officer, go figure. It’s so ripe for transformation right now, from every component of a compliance function. We’re seeing big transformations in third-party risk management, which is traditionally very labor intensive and expensive. We’re seeing a huge amount of use cases in export controls, and given all the tariff changes and everything going on with the global marketplace, export controls and regulatory alignment with sanctions are completely ripe for disruption and the use of agents. Fraud risk management, anti-corruption, looking at transactions. Most importantly, we’re seeing huge demand in whistleblower hotlines and monitoring culture. The DOJ, the US Department of Justice, is really encouraging companies to speak up and raise issues before they go, as part of a self-reporting whistleblower program. A compliance professional wants to make sure their employees are happy, not going to the DOJ first, that they can speak up within the company and feel safe. Monitoring that culture is important, because if you’ve got a rogue employee or group of employees in some country or business unit that you’re not seeing, that scares the heck out of compliance officers. Being able to monitor your whistleblower hotline, employee exit surveys, defects, and email systems for spikes or risk indicators, that’s what agentic AI does. No human could ever spend that much time and digest that much information. A dashboard can monitor it very well and cost effectively.

Jeanniey Walden: Last question. Can companies build their own AI agents, or should they partner with experts that have more established LLMs built with the rules that make sure the digital assistants work as effectively as possible?

Vince Walden: It’s funny, in a perfect world every single Fortune 500 company has developers and in-house development capabilities. The problem I see, and we’re working with Fortune 500 companies, even some of the biggest tech and AI companies in the world, is why are we working with AI companies? Mainly because their AI people are focused on their product, not on improving the compliance department, so they can’t get the resources. My background is that I was a white-collar-crime investigator for a big-four firm for a decade. You need domain expertise to build the systems for compliance and build those agents. Being able to outsource that build frees you up and doesn’t require IT resources. Companies are coming to us at Kona AI to build those specific compliance-related agents so they can deploy in-house, behind their firewall.

Jeanniey Walden: Amazing. This was such an interesting conversation, and I can’t wait to follow and see where these digital assistants show up. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Vince Walden: Thank you, Jeanniey. It’s great to be here in lovely Miami. I’ve got the pink shirt on, trying to fit in.

This conversation was recorded for Liftoff with Jeanniey Walden and lightly edited for readability.