11. Alex Padgette, EMEA Partnerships at Vanta - Shadow AI Is the New GDPR, Compliance Automation and Building Partnerships That Actually Deliver

Shadow AI is already inside your company. Employees are plugging proprietary data into tools like ChatGPT without authorisation and most businesses have no visibility into it. Alex Padgette has seen this movie before. She was at OneTrust when GDPR landed and forced every company in Europe to take data privacy seriously. Now at Vanta, which just hit $300M ARR, she thinks AI governance is about to do the same thing. In this episode of Inside the Pipeline, Tris Tusa sits down with Alex Padgette, EMEA Partnerships at Vanta, to talk about what compliance automation actually looks like at scale, why the question has shifted from "Are we secure?" to "How are we governing our AI tools?", and what it means to be at the centre of that transition twice in a career. They also get into partnerships. Alex's take is that strategic alignment is overrated. What matters is measurable KPIs, tangible results, and having a real internal champion at the partner organisation. She explains how Vanta built its partner ecosystem across AWS and beyond, and what makes EMEA genuinely different from the US market when you're trying to scale internationally. And she talks about starting as an SDR. Why she thinks the hunting skills you build early are the foundation everything else sits on, and why she'd make the same choice again. If your business is using AI tools, thinking about SOC 2, or building a partnership motion in EMEA, this conversation has something for you.