Innovation in Compliance with Tom Fox Navigating AI: Governance, Risk with some Culture Thrown in with Matt Kunkel
Innovation spans many areas, and compliance professionals need not only to be ready for it but also to embrace it. Join Tom Fox, the Voice of Compliance, as he visits with top innovative minds, thinkers, and creators in the award-winning Innovation in Compliance podcast. In this episode, host Tom Fox interviews Matt Kunkel, CEO and Co-Founder at LogicGate, about the company’s governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platform and current market trends.
Matt recounts his path into regulatory risk and compliance work that led to founding LogicGate and launching its Risk Cloud platform in 2015. A major focus is AI governance. Tom and Matt explore how and why senior management is asking compliance teams to provide governance frameworks despite the absence of a single standard (e.g., NIST/ISO/SOC). Matt explains organizations need scalable processes to triage and route large volumes of AI usage requests, apply guardrails based on data sensitivity and criticality, and avoid becoming a bottleneck to innovation. He emphasizes training and culture to address employee misuse, highlighting risks of exposing proprietary data and the need to define what information is acceptable to input into AI models.
The discussion turns to LogicGate’s culture and how it has been sustained during rapid, organic growth (no acquisitions). Matt outlines LogicGate’s six values: Be as One, Embrace Your Curiosity, Empower Customers, Raise the Bar, Own It, and Do the Right Thing. For evaluating AI and modernizing compliance programs, he frames value in three outcomes: making money, reducing costs, or reducing risk, and describes LogicGate’s value realization framework that translates efficiency and ROI into business terms. He also describes Risk Cloud as an orchestration layer for compliance programs and anticipates more “intentional AI” and selective use of agentic capabilities rather than fully autonomous end-to-end program execution.
Key highlights:
- From Consulting to GRC: Coding, Madoff Investigation, and Founding LogicGate
- Why AI Is Supercharging the “G” in GRC
- LogicGate’s Culture Playbook: Values That Scale with Hypergrowth
- How to Evaluate AI Tools in Compliance: Proving Value, ROI, and “Intentional AI”
- Cybersecurity in 2026: AI-Powered Social Engineering, Deepfakes, and Risk Mapping
- What’s Next for GRC by 2030: Agents, Responsible AI, and Tech as the Glue
Resources:
Matt Kunkel on LinkedIn
Innovation in Compliance was recently ranked Number 4 in Risk Management by 1,000,000 Podcasts.