Arti Raman, CEO and Founder, Portal26 – Interview Series

Arti Raman, CEO and founder of Portal26, is a seasoned tech leader driving enterprise adoption of secure and responsible Generative AI; under her leadership, Portal26 has become an award-winning GenAI governance and data security platform, earning her recognition including the 2023 Cyber Person of the Year nomination, 2022 Titan Business Awards for Female CEO and Female Entrepreneur of the Year, 2022 Tech Trailblazer, 2023 SVBJ Women of Influence, and 2023 Data Power Women of the Year honors.

Portal26 is an enterprise-focused AI Trust, Risk & Security Management (AI TRiSM) platform that helps organizations safely adopt and scale Generative AI by providing comprehensive visibility, governance, risk mitigation, and analytics across all AI usage; the platform detects shadow AI and enterprise AI consumption, enforces policy and compliance, supports data security and privacy controls, and delivers actionable insights to optimize GenAI strategy, enabling companies to manage security, compliance, and business value in a single integrated system.

You founded Portal26 in 2019, well before generative AI entered the enterprise mainstream. What early signals convinced you that organizations would struggle with uncontrolled generative AI usage, and how did your background in security and product leadership shape the company’s original mission?

I was inspired to launch Portal26 (then named Titaniam) following the 2017 Equifax breach. I was one of millions impacted by the wide-reaching security incident, which motivated me to find new ways to protect personal data.

We developed and brought our data security platform to market initially. Soon after, we realized that customers were utilizing it to support the creation of AI and ML repositories. As GenAI adoption picked up speed, we realized our platform could serve a broader even more timely purpose. We used our early foundation to create a SaaS platform that empowers companies to consume GenAI securely and responsibly. As we grew, we worked with our customers to go beyond security and governance to also enable them to understand the biggest challenge facing enterprises, how to extract the full value out of their GenAI programs including use case discovery, strategy, ROI, licensing management and agentic opportunity discovery.

Portal26 initially focused on shadow generative AI discovery and generative AI security. As customers began deploying generative AI more broadly, what disconnect did you observe between adoption and actual business outcomes?

Our initial focus was on “turning on the lights” and ensuring GenAI usage was secure. This was and remains a valuable outcome, especially as security is the very first obstacle faced by enterprise AI leaders. However, being the very first to launch an AI security solution in 2023, we have noticed that despite having strong security controls, most – if not all customers – still struggle with achieving desired business outcomes.

We learned from our customers that the big disconnect between adoption and actual business outcomes is that companies are going about the AI adoption process backwards! Anybody that has spent any time in product management or product strategy knows that a product not grounded in a real understanding of users is highly unlikely to succeed. However, when it comes to AI, enterprises have absolutely no idea what their user base needs and why. Instead of focusing on understanding demand, all enterprise AI these days is handed down from the top based on executive brainstorming or recommendations from consultants. Over the last few years, AI built or purchased in this manner has shown positive ROI less than 5% of the time. This is a very big disconnect.

Portal26 recently introduced an AI Value Realization module. What was fundamentally missing from how enterprises were evaluating generative AI investments prior to this, and why have traditional analytics or business intelligence tools fallen short?

Employees at 90% of companies already use personal AI tools like ChatGPT at work…while some may be sanctioned, in most cases, the usage is not. Organizations have little to no visibility into how their employees are embracing and seeing value in GenAI. Meanwhile, companies spent $37B on GenAI in 2025, says Menlo Ventures, yet study after study shows proof of concepts are failing. Traditional analytics or business intelligence tools don’t solely focus on AI usage, and weeding through the noise to find the GenAI productivity nuggets is cumbersome.

Portal26’s Value Realization solution offers four key areas of functionality that address the big gap in achieving business outcomes from AI investments. First, understanding user behavior in the context of AI usage. Second, extracting high-value use cases while minimizing risk. Third, identifying agent or app opportunities with comprehensive input on required features and fourth, guidance on deployment, education, migration and continuous monitoring of usage and value.  With these four blocks in place, business outcomes are guaranteed.

Your platform emphasizes continuous, behavior-level signals across the enterprise. Which types of usage data are most critical for determining whether a generative AI initiative is creating real business value rather than surface-level activity?

We see and understand the usage of all GenAI within the enterprise, including use case and intent – it is all evidence-based – so you can see usage, or lack thereof of sanctioned and unsanctioned tools.  So specifically, the enterprise can see:

• What tools are being used
• Who’s using them
• What department are they in?
• Intent
• How are they being used
• What’s the use case
• What are they trying to achieve for the business?
• When do users follow the policy, and when do they go rogue? Why?
• Frequency of use

This data ultimately helps organizations determine which use cases deserve enterprise investment and which they can eliminate or reduce for cost savings and overall increased productivity.

Many organizations report heavy experimentation with generative AI but limited success moving from proof of concept to production. Based on what you have seen, what are the most common reasons these initiatives fail to scale?

There are four reasons these initiatives fail to scale:

1. Lack of understanding of user behavior and intent when it comes to AI
2. Lack of visibility into use cases that drive real value while minimizing risk
3. Even if the right use case is identified, the supported features are wrong or incomplete
4. Lack of visibility into effective migration paths to direct users from other solutions into the new enterprise sanctioned solution

As a result, enterprises spend millions building out AI-based use cases that never scale and never provide ROI.

The AI Value Realization module is designed to support leaders such as CIOs, CFOs, and Chief AI Officers. How do these stakeholders typically define success differently when it comes to generative AI, and how does Portal26 help align their priorities?

In addition to CIOs, CISOs and functional leaders, who already benefit from the Portal26 GenAI Adoption Platform, additional stakeholders for our AI Value Realization Module include chief AI officers who own overall AI programs, AI product managers who own agentic AI development, CFOs who own cost and ROI, and chief people officers who are engaged in enterprise workforce development initiatives.  Finally, CEOs and boards will now be able to answer the question “how are we creating value” from our GenAI program with real, trusted  metrics.

CIOs and CISOs will naturally be more focused on how AI works with their existing technology infrastructure and security stack, as well as ensuring proper governance and threat protection are put into place. They will be focused on managing risk around how employees interact with AI, yes, but also how AI interacts with their software and tools, plus what access needs to be granted or prevented. Success to them = smooth technology operations and minimal security risk.

CFOs define success by the ROI seen on AI projects. They want to know how the technology is making employees more productive and/or making their offerings more appealing to customers, thus leading to more revenue. Preventing risk to the company and brand is important, but the bottom line is the biggest priority.

Chief AI officers and AI product managers are interested in the actual functionality of the AI tools adopted by their organizations. How can they improve the existing products they offer? How can they enhance internal processes?

Finally, chief people officers will want to know how they can support training, upskilling and keeping employees happy. They may also look at where AI can make people more efficient in their roles, so they can potentially expand or adjust their job descriptions to support their career growth without overloading.

Each one of these stakeholders can benefit from the user behavior analysis from our platform, bring better arguments to the table when asking for increased investment in certain tools, and ideally enable real value creation from their GenAI program.

You have spoken about how generative AI needs evolve over time. Why is static planning especially risky for generative AI programs, and how should enterprises think about strategy in a continuously changing AI environment?

Just look at the news cycle in the tech space these days. New GenAI players are seemingly emerging weekly, and established Big Tech firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and Google are consistently updating their existing tools with new chatbot and GenAI features to remain in the race. If companies stick to static planning, their employees’ curiosity and willingness to experiment with new tools will disrupt their strategy almost immediately. Governance and policies only go so far. When new tools become available and employees quickly embrace them, yet you don’t update your AI rules internally, they become Shadow AI. That not only creates security risks but can render your existing AI investments less effective. Real-time data on GenAI user behavior will help manage this problem long term.

Enterprises often feel tension between the urgency to adopt generative AI and the need to manage risk. How do you think organizations should balance rapid innovation with governance, policy enforcement, and accountability?

To responsibly keep pace with rapid adoption, organizations must move beyond reactive GenAI governance to a proactive, evidence-based AI strategy. They must harness user behavior data to focus on high value agents, applications and migrations, ensuring radical improvement to AI outcomes.

The companies winning at AI balance appropriate policies and governance without holding their employees back so they can actually innovate, the way they like. This balanced approach is not just good governance and security. It’s good business.

Portal26 now spans shadow generative AI discovery, generative AI security, and AI value realization. How do these three pillars reinforce each other inside large, complex organizations?

Every organization we talk to has three questions around GenAI they need to answer before they can be successful.

1. What AI is being used?
2. How can I ensure it’s secure?
3. How do I create value?

These three questions incorporate security, risk and governance on one side, and adoption, use cases, strategy, productivity and ROI on the other – they are a yin and yang that need to be addressed together.  We are the only GenAI Adoption Management Platform that holistically addresses all these critical success factors.

Looking forward, what do you believe enterprises most misunderstand about measuring generative AI success today, and what mindset shift is required to move from experimentation to durable competitive advantage?

One of the challenges we see is that organizations are still siloed in their approach to GenAI.  CISO/CIO/GC is focused on risk.  GenAI Officer, CFO, CEO are focused on creating value.  So there is no unified success metric to measure against.  Additionally, most organizations are getting a zero to limited view of the actual GenAI activity within their company, meaning they have incomplete data and analytics to understand what’s going on, which includes a real benchmark to measure from.  Our customers have accurate board level reporting within a week to truly understand what’s going on from risk to innovation.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Portal26.