Innovation comes in many areas, and compliance professionals need to not only be ready for it but 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 welcomes Mara Senn, Founder and CEO of Ethakos.
What is innovation in compliance? Mara Senn certainly shows it in this podcast. Her path to founding Ethakos spans Big Law, early FCPA and anti-corruption work, investigations at the World Bank, and senior in-house compliance roles at major Fortune 500 companies. That experience gave her a clear view of the everyday frustrations compliance teams face, especially clunky tools, dirty data, and rigid workflows that slow down real investigations. She built Ethakos as an AI-native, highly configurable platform to solve those pain points, using “vibe coding” with Claude to move quickly while keeping human judgment at the center of every decision. In her view, the platform reflects a simple but powerful idea: AI should make compliance work faster and cleaner, not replace the expertise and risk-based thinking that good compliance professionals bring.
Key highlights:
- Vibe coding Ethakos through dozens of decisions
- Start with actionable hits, not meaningless alerts
- AI-generated first drafts for chronologies and interviews
- Audit logs and document-linked investigative credibility
- Tech-forward compliance teams identifying 13 risks instead
Resources:
Mara Senn on LinkedIn
Tom Fox
My first work of general non-fiction is now out: Deluge Before Dawn, the story of the 2025 flood in Kerr County, Texas, which killed 119 people and devastated a county. It is a story of tragedy, heartbreak, survival, and resilience.
It is available on the following sites:
This week only, the Kindle e-book version is available for $0.99 on Amazon.
