Audit & Beyond 2025 | Guru Sethupathy, FairNow

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Guru Sethupathy

Founder & CEO,

FairNow

play_circle_outline Introduction of Guru Sethupathy, Founder and CEO of FairNow, after recent acquisition news.

play_circle_outline FairNow's mission to simplify AI governance and build trust around AI technology.

play_circle_outline Unifying Forces: FairNow and AuditBoard’s Merger to Build a Future of Intelligent Automation in Governance Solutions

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Guru Sethupathy, FairNow

Guru Sethupathy

Founder & CEO, FairNow

In this Audit & Beyond interview, Guru Sethupathy, founder and chief executive officer of FairNow, joins theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay to unpack the big on-site news: FairNow’s acquisition and what it means for AI governance. Sethupathy explains FairNow’s core mission: to simplify AI governance so organizations can manage risk, build trust and move AI from pilot to production. He outlines the practical workflow: inventory AI systems, tier risk, map controls and compliance, evidence outcomes and prepare for audits and testing. The discussion addres... Read more

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of AuditBoard's Audit & Beyond here in San Diego. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Rob Strechay. Rob, there was some big news announced today on the main stage.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. Very exciting. I was like, "Oh, wow, I didn't expect that." So it was a lot of fun to see.

Rebecca Knight

>> A big acquisition.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> And with that, I would like to introduce the stirrer of the news. He is Guru Sethupathy, Founder and CEO of FairNow.

Guru Sethupathy

>> Thank you for having me. Nice to meet you guys.

Rebecca Knight

>> It's great to have you on and congratulations-

Guru Sethupathy

>> Thank you....

Rebecca Knight

>> on the acquisition. Very exciting.

Guru Sethupathy

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Before we get to the acquisition, let's back up and talk about what FairNow does, what it was, what was your onus for founding this company?

Guru Sethupathy

>> Yep, happy to share. I really believe in our mission, right? So FairNow, we've been around for about three years, and our mission was to simplify AI governance. For your listeners, what does that even mean? Why is that important? Look, I think this is an important mission, because for AI to really take off, you have to manage the risks and build trust. Think about how you view AI today. There's an element of excitement, but also distrust around this technology. And that's there whether you're a personal user or in a corporation. And so for AI to take off, you're going to need to have governance system in place to manage the risks, have it be audited, know what it's doing, and have all of those things come together from a risk management standpoint to be able to enable it, for it to flourish. But me and my team have lived the pain of AI governance and how manual it is. And so our whole thesis was like, "Hey, let's reduce the frictions around AI governance. Let's make it simpler so that then people can focus on implementing AI." And so that was how we started AI FairNow, why we started FairNow, and we think it's going to be an important need well into the future.

Rob Strechay

>> So as you look at that, what changes for your customers? Because I think, I'm sure they're sitting there going, "Oh wow, this is exciting and new. And hey, by the way, this is exciting and new."

Guru Sethupathy

>> It's funny you ask, because I gave a lot of our customers a heads-up about this. And look, for the most part, they're very excited. One of the things that we're very proud of is how just the customer support that we have and how much they love our product and our platform and want to partner with us on this journey. So for them, nothing's going to change in the short term. They're going to continue to be able to use the platform. I think what's going to happen in the medium term is an acceleration of our roadmap, because now we have the resources of AuditBoard behind us to accelerate the very cool roadmap that they were excited about. So that's the positive aspect for them. And the roadmap, especially around automation capabilities. Automation capabilities, intelligence embedded in the platform, all of that stuff. The other thing is being able to serve now AuditBoard's customers. A lot of folks have been asking about AI governance and how AuditBoard can help them. And now, AuditBoard has a purpose-built solution that they can start to sell to their customers and help them on this journey. And so that's really the benefit to both sides here is our purpose-built built technology. Then being able to take this across AuditBoard's huge distribution channel and all of their customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Can you provide a use case? Because as you said, the mission is to simplify AI governance, but how does that work in practice? Can you talk about a company that you helped identify a risk and then mitigate that they hadn't even considered was a risk?

Guru Sethupathy

>> Sure. I can give you a lot of examples, but let me walk you through a thread. AI governance is a process. It's a process of knowing what you have, what are all the AI systems that you have in your organization, that's governance 101, and then knowing which ones are high risk, which ones are low risk, and then understanding based on the risk leveling, what are the controls and requirements and compliance needs that you have to satisfy. And then actually going and executing that compliance roadmap, evidencing and all of that kind of stuff. And then being ready for any kind of audit, being able to do testing on your tools. It's all of these things coming together. Nobody is really doing that right now, right? Because we're early in this journey, so it's not a bad thing per se, but they're going to need to do all that. So one of the examples I'll give you is a lot of customers that we went and talked to, I would say, "Hey, how many AI applications do you have in your organization?" No one knew. No one even knew that, that's the first step, and they weren't even there yet. And so imagine all the other things that they still need to do. And so that's where our FairNow, we started to help them both in terms of guiding them on like, "Hey, this is what you need to start doing. And then, oh, by the way, the platform can really help simplify that for you."

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. I mean, I just look at how fast AI is evolving. And again, two years ago, we weren't talking about agents and multi-language models being tied together with traditional AI. When you look at it and you look out over the next couple years here, to me, the landscape seems to be getting more complex and that the governance is going to be that much harder. So where I expect you to come in, so-

Guru Sethupathy

>> That's right. That's exactly our thesis. In fact, the technology is so far ahead right now, there is over a decade's worth of work for companies just to implement their current AI technology today. Meaning, you don't need to wait for the technology to get better. What needs to happen are two things, and this is where we come in. One is just figuring out where are you going to adopt AI in your organization? And the second is, how are you going to govern it? Think about this. Imagine in the very near future, you're going to have companies who have dozens if not hundreds of AI systems in their organization across the entire team, instead of people, employees across their teams. Are these systems working? Are they working as intended? Are they doing strange things? Are they compliant? What's the output? Who's reviewing the output? Is it making decisions automatically? Think about all of those really complicated questions. If you're not governing that, there's huge amounts of business risk. And in fact, that's what we're seeing. There was actually, I think, an MIT report out on this, I'm sure your audience might be familiar, where a lot of AI is not really driving value yet. A lot of that is maybe even sitting in pilot stage and not moving to production and so on and so forth. And a big reason for that is companies are terrified at the potential risks here. It's not just legal risk, it's business risk. You don't want to be on the front page caught doing something ridiculous, or you don't want to be having systems that hallucinate. There was a famous Air Canada lawsuit around this, right? And so how do you get around that? And that's the beauty of governance. Governance is such a high ROI activity, because it both reduces risks and it builds trust to increase adoption. So that makes both your legal risk and compliance folks happy, but it also makes your AI scientists happy because now they get to move faster. And I can tell you this from my personal experience. So when I was at Capital One, I was an executive there and I came in with this pretty ambitious agenda around AI and how that was going to modernize and elevate some of the business aspects we were trying to solve. And initially, there was just a lot of pushback or consternation, let's say. And the reason for that is Capital One rightfully is in a very regulated domain, and you really have to manage those risks. And so when we were much more thoughtful around our governance practices on our team, connecting that to the enterprise risk management efforts, being more transparent, having a clear process, having clear roles and responsibilities, we were actually able to move a lot more faster from an innovation standpoint, because this is a question people often have, is governance going to slow down innovation? And I actually think if you do it smartly, you could actually speed up innovation.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, there's actually a lot of research that shows constraints are in fact freeing, not limiting in the way that you-

Guru Sethupathy

>> Yes. If done smartly. That's right.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right. Exactly.

Guru Sethupathy

>> That's right.

Rebecca Knight

>> But when you were talking about how risk-averse organizations are because they see the problems with AI, but then I was thinking about, well, yeah, they've also just lived through recently, COVID, geopolitical tension, supply chain disruptions, and so I kind of get it. I get why they're so concerned and skeptical perhaps. When you think about this moment that we are living through that organizations are trying to lead through so much uncertainty, how do you describe the evolving risk landscape? And then how do you talk about it with your clients and customers?

Guru Sethupathy

>> The first thing I start by saying is don't worry in the sense of you're not being left behind. That's a feeling that a lot of organizations have is that they're not moving fast enough. And here's what I'll say. Innovation happens on two streams. One is the scientific R&D type innovation that OpenAI and all of these companies are leading. But the other non-sexy innovation is how do you take a technology and implement it inside of a complex organization? And that is really hard. That is really hard. It entails redesigning workflows. It entails redesigning how you make decisions within the company. It entails upskilling your workforce. It entails doing risk management and governance. It entails all of that. And that can take years. And so that's why I say, when people think like AI is going to change the world, I agree, just not on the timeline most people think, and it's because of this factor. And so that's when I tell people, look, it's fine, you're not getting left behind, but now is this time to start thinking about these other things. How are you have the right talent in place? How are you upskilling your organization? How are you redesigning your workflow and change management? And how are you building governance? And we're going to help you with that, right? So now is the time to think about these things, but you have time.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think you hit on a really important thing, and I think there's the balancing the compliance with frameworks and innovation and tying them together. How do you see what you're doing, again, helping people have those guardrails be able to innovate and comply at the same time?

Guru Sethupathy

>> It goes back to the story I was telling you. If you have smart governance in place, you can both manage the risks and then build the trust that requires the adoption and innovation. But here's the precise thing though. There's this concept of under-regulation and over-regulation. There's a similar concept here of under-governance and over-governance. If you have no governance at all, I'm telling you, you will not adopt AI. But at the same time, we're not espousing over-governance either, right? Here's the classic analogy I give. Everyone gets the automobile, right? The car. If I told you, "Hey, you're going to head home. And then by the time you get home, there's going to be no street lights, no stop signs, no traffic cops, no driver's license needed. Anybody can drive, no DUI laws, anything like that." Are you going to go faster, or are you going to be scared to get in your car? And it's the latter. That's what good governance can do is build that trust where now I don't worry about who's on the road, I know things are being taken care of. And so here again, smart governance. So there's two elements to smart governance that our platform helps with. One is position. Every organization is different. If you apply a peanut butter spread of governance across your organization, you're going to be doing way too much governance. That's what over-governance is. So our platform provides the guided intelligence for your organization to figure out what precisely you need to be doing. So that reduces the workload and focuses that attention precisely on what you need to do. The second piece is automations. There's a bunch of automations that automate tedious tasks like documentation and reviewing, and all this kind of stuff. And so the combination of precision governance plus automation is what I call smart governance. And so if you do that, you're threading the needle. You're minimizing your risks, and yet you're not hobbling everyone from moving forward from innovation and adoption.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Guru, you have a very interesting CV. You have taught economics, you've been an investment banking analyst, an executive at a bank, and then obviously a founder, entrepreneur, and now you've just got bought by a big company. So what is next for you personally, especially as we've talked about? This is a really unusual and exciting moment in time right now for technology.

Guru Sethupathy

>> It really is, and I'm just really feel lucky to be part of it. Look, I've had a really, really fun career. And some of the common theme of it at some level is technology. So whether it be my time in academia and consulting or at Capital One and in FairNow, and now at AuditBoard, all of it has been around technology. And specifically a type of technology that is now broadly called AI. Before, it was called other things like analytics and machine learning and so on and so forth. I actually got into AI when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I had a specialization in AI. I got into it when, I'm going to date myself here, 1997, IBM had an AI program. I don't know if you guys will recall this, called Deep Blue that beat Garry Kasparov in chess. And I was a very amateur chess player back then and was just mesmerized by that possibility. That's how I got into this field and have been in it for quite a long time. And it's just exciting to be at a stage in this field where it's about to take off. And in terms of where we're going in the future, I'm so excited by this acquisition because both AuditBoard's vision and our vision overlines a lot. And I'll say a couple of things. One, AuditBoard was built by experts for experts, and they talk about that a lot. That's how I see FairNow. We have this background, which is fairly unique. Not a lot of MRM, model risk management and AI governance experts out there, and so we really bring that to the table. But the second thing is their vision and our vision for intelligent, automated and connected. And you've probably heard that many times already in the keynotes today and so on. And so that shared vision I think is going to be an awesome combination between our platform, their platform, and then to be able to go build that ecosystem.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, Guru, this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you so much for coming on, theCUBE.

Guru Sethupathy

>> Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strechay, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Audit & Beyond. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.