Speakers

Dr. Shlomit Labin
VP of Data Science, Shield

Alex de Lucena
Director of Product Strategy, Shield

Dr. Yair Fogel Dror
Director of Data Science, Shield

Moderated by Jess Jones
ThoughtNetworks
See how Shield’s AmplifAI is redefining communication surveillance and risk management with explainable AI built for regulated industries.
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This session takes you beyond the hype into practical, defensible use cases—showing how GenAI can be targeted to add real value without breaking existing controls or budgets.

Dr. Shlomit Labin
VP of Data Science, Shield

Alex de Lucena
Director of Product Strategy, Shield

Dr. Yair Fogel Dror
Director of Data Science, Shield

Moderated by Jess Jones
ThoughtNetworks
Shield Insiders In-Focus
Speakers
Jess: Welcome, everyone. I’m Jess Jones, and I’m delighted to moderate today’s panel on AmplifAI with the people who built it. In this session, we’ll dive into how Shield is purpose-building powerful AI capabilities — AI assistance, summarization, and improving detection and risk coverage. These innovations are transforming how compliance professionals tackle challenges in surveillance, risk management, and discovery. Let me introduce our expert team: Shlomit Labin, VP of Data Science at Shield; Alex DeLucena, Director of Product Strategy at Shield; and Yair Fogel-Dror, Director of Data Science at Shield.
Shlomit, if I can ask you first: Shield’s AI-powered assistant, Shiela, represents a significant leap in using AI for compliance. Could you explain how AI assistance, specifically through Shiela, is enhancing productivity and accuracy for compliance professionals?
Shlomit: Sure, Jess — and delighted to be here. Maybe I’ll start from a broader perspective, on the leap that occurred in the AI world in the past two years. For several years, we’ve been training machine-learning models for specific tasks — detection, analysis, classification — collecting data, training on it, and so on. Since the emergence of the new GenAI technology that started with ChatGPT and all the competitors that have developed since, we’re in a new world where human-level reasoning is really possible. Suddenly there are models that actually understand what we’re asking and can communicate with people. Most people in the modern world have experienced that and know how it feels, and at Shield we want to utilize it for the compliance team as well.
The major change is the ability to understand direct instructions or requests from users. Where we used to need to draft requests, curate queries, or — in the older-fashioned world — build lexicons and figure out exactly how to ask information of our systems, today we can do it in natural human language, presenting our needs without pre-training the system in advance. Shiela is a great example. It addresses the analysis task of surveillance teams. They have access to a lot of data, and queries can be written to fetch and curate it, but search tasks used to require a level of expertise — you needed to know how to curate a question. With Shiela, we’re producing a platform that lets you ask whatever you want of your own data and get not only a direct answer but all the relevant communications associated with it.
Alex: As one of those people — I was once one of those experts — it’s different. You had to be two people. One, an expert who understands a platform really well — which a lot of times means the mechanic who knows how the old car works. It’s just an interface, and you know how to find things with it, but it’s not the best way to search. The other kind of expert is someone who understands those communications from a market perspective and a linguistic perspective — how people speak. Sitting where I used to sit, I got pretty good at knowing how people communicate, but it meant I had to do a lot of these investigations, because I was the one person who could squeeze results out of a dataset.
The great thing about Shiela is you can get to the heart of the matter much faster, and you don’t have to be an expert. The example I think of: a few years back there was an ice storm, and we had to investigate whether a lot of money had been made around it. We knew the traders, we pulled all the comms, but there was no easy way to figure out exactly what they were talking about. We could type “ice storm” and get some messages, but not everything — ultimately we had to look through everything, under high pressure. With Shiela, you can go straight to “show me conversations about the ice storm,” “show me conversations about project X,” get to the heart of the matter much quicker, and then interrogate that further — are there signs of frustration? Is someone behaving inappropriately with regard to X? — and pull together a much more detailed picture of what your dataset is saying.
Shlomit: From a technological perspective, the magic is that the system suddenly understands you. You don’t need to learn the system and its language — it understands human language, and that’s a huge difference. It will create a huge effect on the way people work and what can be achieved.
Jess: Those are fascinating insights. Can you expand on how that streamlines processes — how Shiela’s “conversation with the data” fits into the AmplifyAI product offerings? Alex, maybe you have thoughts on the process.
Alex: We have a few tools that help, not just Shiela. With Shiela, another way to think of it is that instead of relying on a specialist for the system, you can ask the specialist for the information to just ask the questions — you bypass that step. Shiela is pretty purpose-built for investigations at this point; it sits over cases. You pull together a set of communications, and it sits on top and can tell you what’s in there. Now you can bring someone directly from legal, HR, fraud, or InfoSec — wherever the concern is — and they can have at that information, which is rich, because often those people sit at a distance from the communications; they don’t see them until they’ve been boiled down into an alert. From an efficiency and coverage perspective — not just regulatory risk, but any risk in a dataset — that adds a lot.
The other one is Risk Reasoning. One thing we’ve seen GenAI is really good at is summarizing — we’ve all had that experience. But what Shlomit and her team have developed is a way to specifically tease out what the risk is in an email and summarize that for reviewers or anyone accessing those alerts. That’s a huge efficiency gain. A lot of times we don’t know why we’re looking at something, especially more junior staff — these issues are really complex — so Risk Reasoning tells reviewers why they should look at it.
Shlomit: To continue what Alex is mentioning: the system understands you, but it’s also tailored to look at everything from the perspective of finance, compliance, and financial risk. Risk Reasoning is a great example — instead of just receiving an answer or a summary when reviewing an alert or asking a question in Shiela, everything is focused through the eye of a compliance officer. That creates a huge difference in the efficiency of the results and the information given to the user. That’s the uniqueness of the entire AmplifAI offering: it’s a leap to the breathtaking new AI technology, but also tailoring it exactly to the use case and focusing it to look at the world from the perspective of a compliance officer. This can be achieved right now, and we’re very excited about it.
Jess: Yair, can I bring you in? Could you give us your thoughts around the accuracy and scalability of the new toolkit, particularly over substantial datasets, and how the technologies maintain responsiveness while analyzing them?
Yair: Sure. The main focus isn’t necessarily accuracy, but how to build trust that the solution is accurate at scale — because the customers, the regulator, everyone needs to trust the system to be accurate enough. You can drive trust in one of two ways. You can understand exactly how the system operates — which was easier with previous technologies; rule-based solutions and classic machine learning seemed more transparent and explainable. With GenAI, especially the most advanced and accurate solutions, we usually see huge models where we don’t have complete information about how they were trained or which data was used. That’s more challenging. But on the other hand, you can leverage the model’s ability to communicate with you in plain language — not only to instruct it, but to have it share its own thinking process. Even if I don’t entirely understand how the model operates, I can read a simple explanation of what it thought I asked it to do and why, given a specific input, it raised an alert or not. That brings some explainability and transparency into the model’s thinking.
The other way to gain trust is by experience — engaging with the technology enough times to see it works, with large enough numbers. Even though GenAI isn’t as data-driven from our perspective — you don’t need large labeled datasets to train it — we actually focus even more than before on getting a very large benchmark dataset of labeled data to experiment with and evaluate our solutions against. That benchmark is growing faster, containing data from different customers and domains, fabricated data, real data, and all the hard edge cases — hard negatives, hard positives, very subtle cases — that previous technologies struggled with. We put a lot of focus on benchmarking every version and every solution we deliver, and getting numbers to support the accuracy.
The other challenge is operating these technologies at scale, because the more advanced the technology, the slower it is and the more it costs. You can’t just use GenAI as-is on all the data you have — it would take too much time. So we’ve shifted the way our system is built: instead of a specific model with a predefined task, we build an entire pipeline or workflow of analysis. That helps us decide very wisely where and when to apply which solution, so we can benefit from the smartest models — even though they’re slower and cost more — by applying them smartly only on the relevant data, and run them at scale.
Jess: Some fascinating points. Going back to the model explaining its own thinking process — that’s a game changer for anyone asking the questions and understanding the thinking behind it.
Yair: I agree. It was actually found out almost by accident — the models weren’t originally designed to do that, but researchers found that if you ask the model to explain itself and think out loud, you benefit two ways: you can understand what the model has done, and you also get better accuracy. The more interactive the flow of information between the user and the model, the better the results and the explainability.
Jess: And on benchmarking — that’s so pivotal for people in compliance to trust. Any other insights?
Yair: Benchmarking in our domain is very challenging, because we want a benchmark big enough to trust the model across different circumstances, use cases, data sources, and customer types — but we’re often looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s hard to collect a lot of data and label it to find enough suspicious content to test against. We want the coverage as high as possible with as little noise as possible, so we want a huge labeled dataset with those positive alerts, which is very challenging. Fortunately, we used to work on data-driven solutions, so we created advanced techniques to collect data, label it fast, and create more varied data. Now, instead of using that data to train solutions, we can use much more of it to evaluate our solutions — the fact that we don’t need to train the model gives us the opportunity to test it even more.
Jess: Shlomit, could you give us some thoughts on how the AmplifAI toolkit helps surface key insights from communications and aids in identifying potential risks?
Shlomit: We embedded GenAI in the AmplifAI solution in our surveillance stack. As Yair mentioned, it comes with high cost and performance considerations, so you need to choose wisely when to ask the questions. Our system is built in a multilayered way, with a lot of our investment in how to widen the net we’re spreading to find the things that may be relevant — and now we have GenAI to inspect it, do a second iteration of human-level thinking, filter out what’s not really important, and pinpoint the real risks. We can look at risks from a much wider perspective, reading the entire conversation — and, in a next phase, looking at multiple conversations to understand a growing risk — with no need to pinpoint only sentences the way classical machine-learning models used to.
Additionally, the chain of thought and Risk Reasoning we perform serves three purposes: it improves the model, because performing the reasoning again gets better results; it improves efficiency, because the user understands the risk and what was going on better; and it improves trust, because I can trust it to be accurate. All of this is now embedded in our new solution and makes it very robust.
Another perspective on surfacing risk: we’ve built a way to expand the model — developed first for the Shield AmplifAI solution, but also released to customers for building or expanding models, covering more specific risks, or customizing to their own policies. Customers used to be able to edit or expand lexicons in a traditional manner, and a significant number also shifted to data-science efforts training classifiers and machine-learning models. All of that required significant, heavy lifting, experience, and expertise — Alex can speak to that, as he was one of the model builders. Now, just by learning from specific examples and guided by additional explanations of what needs to be found, we can expand the model’s ability to detect further risks that may not have been considered in the out-of-the-box model. We do it internally, and we’re releasing it to customers, so everything is very interactive and human-level. Risk identification isn’t only more thorough — the ability to modify and expand it is being given to the user in a much more user-friendly way.
Alex: What Shlomit is describing — the flexibility, the customization — is exactly what compliance professionals need, along with broadening the datasets to better pinpoint risks. One of the top concerns for risk, surveillance, and compliance functions is risk coverage — the view that we’re not quite capturing everything, that we don’t have tools suited to how we speak or how our markets change. What Shlomit describes is a capability that lets users take elements of language they’ve identified as potential risks and create essentially mini-models out of them that they control. They sit alongside other detections we’ve developed, and everything we’ve seen shows the results are really strong. By empowering users to create mini-models around risks or language they find relevant, they take ownership of those risks but also get something tailor-made to their risk appetite and their purview across a particular region or market.
I’d add to Yair’s point on summaries — how strong these summaries are. A lot of times the reasoning tells the user something like, “This is what I found based on your question about X. It doesn’t quite contain messages about that, but here are some that might be relevant.” You get language to situate yourself within a set of results or an alert, to know why you’re looking at it and how it was found, so there isn’t a blank space between the prompt and the results — there’s reasoning in between, whether in Shiela or Risk Reasoning.
One other point is the targeted nature of everything we’re building. Where we are with GenAI, we aren’t in a place where people are going to rip everything out wholesale and put this in. Our homework is to figure out targeted ways to add significant value in ways customers can see as measurable and tangible. Credit goes to Shlomit and Yair and their team, because these aren’t just bolted-on GPTs — there’s a lot more going on to satisfy these specific use cases, whether it’s identifying why something alerted, creating mini-models out of language, or Shiela.
Jess: You mentioned taking ownership of the models, and prompts. Is there a growing confidence from clients and users in understanding how to improve their own prompts and get the results they want from GenAI?
Alex: My view is that we have to respect the journey people are on, and everyone is on some kind of journey. We see a lot of different appetites — some are super advanced and trialing things themselves, others are more hesitant, but everyone wants to know about it and educate themselves. What we’re trying to do — and why targeted, thoughtful solutions help — is give tangible ways people can start to use these, that revolutionize elements of their program without revolutionizing everything yet. People are still waiting for regulators to give firm guidance, but there’s enough guidance to say you can start trying this, and if you’re comfortable with the controls and your ability to vet them, you can use these tools. We’ve made them available, we’re using them in POCs and projects, and the results are really good.
Jess: I’d link that back to Yair’s point on building trust and confidence — it’s all part of the same journey. Yair, additional thoughts?
Yair: One method I like: we let a domain expert interact with the system and track the way they interact with it. Say I’m a domain expert and I want the system to catch a new type of suspicious behavior. The first thing I do is find some examples, find some noise, reduce the noise, and pinpoint the system to the specific content I’m interested in. Behind the scenes, we can collect all this interaction — because it’s in plain language — and use it to better learn how to instruct the system going forward. One trick we use: since GenAI can understand things, we can ask it offline to review all this interaction and come up with instructions that represent the same idea the user was interested in. From then on, we get very tailor-made instructions designed from the user’s experience, and we can show those instructions to the user, so they can see “this is what I was looking for, this is how I looked for it, and this is how the system can look for it in the future.” The model itself isn’t transparent, but the instructions can be, to some extent — and that adds to trust, and gives the user an easier ability to control and expand how the system operates.
Jess: Shlomit, I’d love your perspective on how Shield stays at the forefront of implementing the latest technology and driving innovation — and what future innovation is yet to bring.
Shlomit: I have to go back to a previous point about the shift occurring in the industry itself. Since everybody is exposed to these capabilities, the willingness to adopt the new technology is growing at a huge pace, because we see it in everyday life. If I can ask ChatGPT a simple question about anything in the world and get an answer, how can it be that I, as a compliance officer, need to curate a heavy question, send something to the eDiscovery department, and work tediously on the models just to find information? It doesn’t make sense. Even a year ago, there was still a lot of suspicion regarding AI in customer communications. Today, it’s the first question asked: where is it, how can I see it in the product, how will it help me? We’ve been deploying AI for a very long time at Shield, but the AmplifAI offering gives the leap to benefit from the latest and best technology, tailored to the use case and seen through the eyes of a compliance team.
Two more things. First, risk: it’s not only compliance that needs to trust it, but regulators, and regulations are heavily evolving. The EU AI Act came into initial final release just a few weeks ago; it will take time to be enforced, but it represents that everybody acknowledges this technology is here to stay, needs to be regulated, and that every company that develops or uses it must follow those rules — and we are very strict in complying. Second, on staying most updated: it used to be that you curated your own algorithms and trained your own models. But these days, open-source and available models in the market are winning over anything. No car company would develop all the parts itself — everybody specializes. At Shield, we take a model-agnostic approach: the minute a new model is released and proven to be better and faster, and also passes our strict testing for accuracy and performance on our use case, it can immediately be plugged into the system. We tailored the solution around it — curating the questions, creating the flow, working on instructions, building the pipeline of spreading a net — so we’re ready to be most updated with the most recent technology.
Jess: The shift from suspicion to expectation is really fascinating. Alex, are you finding that across the board with the clients you engage with?
Alex: Yes. We’re moving on from the “wow” effect to “okay, how could this benefit me?” Across firms, we’ve seen a lot of internal education, development of policies, and a view on what they can and can’t do with AI, as well as regulators laying down the lines for what’s permissible. So everyone feels more informed as a consumer about how they can bring on these capabilities. A year ago, we saw more of the fascinated “what are you doing, can we talk about it?” — and that was it. Now the RFPs and customer questions we get, and a lot of our demos, are spent digging into what our capabilities can do and how they’d bring them on. Once customers are engaged and asking those questions, the whole relationship becomes more symbiotic, because it feeds how we continue to develop our product.
Jess: Shlomit, when you mention model-agnostic, that gives you the capability to stay nimble and agile and pull out what’s working best — is that right?
Shlomit: It gives us both flexibility in deployment, cost, cloud availability, and user preference to choose the relevant models, and flexibility on releases. When ChatGPT released GPT-4o, we could immediately adapt it — same for a cloud model or any other version. This industry is fast-growing, and models keep improving on a monthly basis, and we want to offer the best solution we can. We built it so we can relatively easily replace and upgrade to the next model — no need to upgrade the entire platform for the user; it’s like plug and play. And still, the trick is how to leverage it to the best use of our customers — how to tailor it to our workflows, product, use case, and layering in a way that gives our customers the best assistance in their day-to-day job. It’s a shift from needing a lot of expertise to run these technologies to actually being able to interact with it.
Jess: Unfortunately, we have to leave the discussion there. Thank you all so much for such interesting input — thanks, Shlomit, Alex, and Yair for everything you had to say today. I really look forward to seeing how these innovative conversations around AI continue to evolve.
Shlomit: Thank you. Bye.
Yair: Thank you. Bye-bye.
No — that’s the core shift. Searching archived communications used to require two kinds of expertise: knowing the platform’s query language, and understanding how people actually speak in your markets. Shiela, Shield’s AI assistant, lets you ask in plain human language and returns not just a direct answer but the relevant communications behind it, so you can get to the heart of an investigation without being a specialist.
Shiela sits on top of a case — a set of communications — so people from legal, HR, fraud, or InfoSec can interrogate that data directly. Normally those teams see communications only after they’ve been boiled down into an alert, at a distance from the source. Letting them ask questions of the raw data improves both efficiency and risk coverage, well beyond purely regulatory risk.
Risk Reasoning uses GenAI to tease out the specific risk inside a communication and explain why an alert fired — framed through the eyes of a compliance officer, not as a generic summary. That matters because many issues are complex, and reviewers, especially junior ones, don’t always know why they’re looking at something. It improves efficiency, sharpens understanding, and builds trust in the output.
Two ways, according to the team. First, the model can explain its own chain of thought, so even without full visibility into a huge model, you can read why it reached a conclusion — and asking it to reason out loud also improves accuracy. Second, trust comes from experience and heavy benchmarking against large labeled datasets, including hard positives, hard negatives, and subtle edge cases across domains and customers.
It would be if applied naively — the most advanced models are slower and cost more, so you can’t run them on everything. AmplifAI is built as a multilayered pipeline: earlier layers widen the net to surface what’s potentially relevant, and the heavier GenAI is applied only where it counts. That lets you benefit from the smartest models while still operating at scale.
Yes. Beyond editing lexicons or training classifiers — which took heavy data-science lifting — AmplifAI lets users build their own “mini-models” from language they’ve identified as risky, guided by a few examples and plain-language explanations of what to find. Those detections sit alongside Shield’s out-of-the-box coverage, and users own them, tailored to their risk appetite and their region or market.
No. Shield takes a model-agnostic approach: when a new model is released and proven better and faster — and passes Shield’s accuracy and performance testing for the use case — it can be plugged in, essentially plug-and-play, without re-platforming. When GPT-4o launched, for example, it could be adapted immediately. Given models improve almost monthly, that keeps the solution current.
No. These aren’t bolted-on GPTs. The value comes from tailoring the technology to compliance: purpose-built pipelines, curated prompts, controls, and workflows designed around specific use cases like investigations, risk detection, and reasoning — all viewed through a compliance-officer lens. The underlying models are powerful, but the engineering around them is what makes the results usable and trustworthy.
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