Vanta’s AI agent cuts compliance work from 8 hours to 1 hour weekly

Vanta has launched an AI Agent designed to automate compliance tasks and transform governance from a reactive burden into a proactive business function. The agent aims to streamline fragmented compliance processes by reasoning over frameworks, detecting inconsistencies, and making data-driven recommendations, potentially reshaping how organizations approach trust and accountability in security management.

The big picture: Compliance is evolving from episodic, manual processes to continuous, AI-driven monitoring that can accelerate business operations rather than slow them down.

• Companies like WorkJam, a workforce management platform, report dramatic efficiency gains, with compliance tasks dropping from seven or eight hours per week to just one hour.
• “Compliance has moved from a resource-draining task into a function that strengthens our overall security posture,” said Tony English, CISO at WorkJam.

How it works: Vanta’s AI Agent processes unstructured compliance data—policy documents, screenshots, and spreadsheets—to create unified, automated workflows.

• The system can detect policy conflicts, pre-validate evidence, and flag overlooked risks before they become audit issues.
• Jeremy Epling, Vanta’s chief product officer, emphasized that “automated compliance and continuous GRC, continuous control monitoring has been at the heart of our founding mission.”

In plain English: GRC stands for governance, risk, and compliance—essentially the policies and procedures companies use to manage security risks and meet regulatory requirements. Continuous monitoring means checking these requirements in real-time rather than only during periodic audits.

Why transparency matters: As AI agents gain more autonomy in compliance decisions, the ability to trace and verify their reasoning becomes critical for maintaining trust.

• Vanta employs former auditors and GRC experts to run human evaluation loops on data sets to ensure AI quality.
• “If we give a recommendation, we tell you where it came from,” Epling explained, highlighting the importance of citeable sources and clear explanations.

The human element: Rather than replacing compliance teams, AI agents are amplifying human expertise by handling routine tasks and creating space for strategic thinking.

• “Responsibilities are now more transparent, ownership is better distributed and our security and engineering teams operate from a shared view of strong compliance,” English noted.
• The technology frees human bandwidth to focus on higher-order tasks while maintaining necessary oversight.

What’s at stake: The shift toward AI-driven compliance raises fundamental questions about accountability and the limits of automation in security governance.

• Over-reliance on AI outputs could erode human scrutiny over time, especially as users grow comfortable with automated recommendations.
• Epling acknowledged this concern, saying his team is working toward more customer-facing transparency to keep both vendors and users accountable.