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👤 Guest Bio
Jeremy is the Chief Product Officer at Vanta, the leading trust management platform helping 7,000+ companies automate security and prove compliance.
Before Vanta, he spent over a decade building some of the most widely used developer products — from GitHub Actions and Codespaces to OneDrive and Azure. Today, Jeremy is leading Vanta’s push into AI, rethinking how trust, compliance, and security can be automated at scale.
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🎙Episode Intro
At Vanta, AI has become the backbone of how companies prove and maintain trust. Jeremy shares how his team is embedding AI into one of the most sensitive domains in SaaS: security and compliance.
From early “boil the ocean” failures, to finding the first use cases that actually stuck, to building trust with enterprise buyers - Jeremy offers a playbook for using to deliver durable customer value.
⏱ What’s Covered
(00:00) Jeremy's path from Microsoft and GitHub to leading product at Vanta
(08:05) Why most AI projects fail — and how to pick ones that succeed
(09:48) Data, trust, and how Vanta doesn't train on customer data
(15:10) The messy truth about customer data infrastructure for AI
(25:00) The breakthrough moments that changed everything
(28:42) Voice notes, transcription tools, and how product leaders actually work
(31:26) How AI is killing the traditional PM role (in a good way)
(33:33) Why PMs are shipping code and designers are pushing PRs
(36:05) Show, don't tell — rapid prototyping over endless PRDs
(41:27) How to get marketing in sync with prod
(48:38) Designers owning the frontend (and what that really means)
(51:53) The "boring" features that still matter in an AI world
(57:06) Three things to do before touching any AI project
(59:01) From GitHub Copilot to Vanta — what changed in the AI playbook
(01:01:24) What's next: Vanta's agent is getting scary smart
💡 Key Takeaways
Start small, not big. Narrow, high-value use cases beat “AI that does everything.”
Trust is everything. Refusing to answer builds more confidence than hallucinating.
Quality drives adoption. Customers come back daily when outputs are accurate.
Subject matter experts matter. Embedding domain experts in eval loops keeps AI grounded.
Design the experience. Templates and guided flows outperform blank chat boxes.
Don’t overinvest in fine-tuning. Prompting, RAG, and eval loops often get you further, faster.
🔗 Where to Find Jeremy
Twitter/X: @jeremy_epling
LinkedIn: Jeremy Epling
Vanta: vanta.com
P.S. Vanta is hiring! If you want to work on AI, security, and trust at scale, you can find open roles here.
📚 References & Mentions
GitHub Copilot – GitHub’s AI coding assistant
Claude Code – Anthropic’s model optimized for coding tasks
Granola - An AI-powered note-taking app that transcribes meetings and expands your notes into clear summaries and action items
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Until next time,
Haroon