The AI Reality Check
Ed Gaudet on the 55,000-vendor risk network behind Censinet
Ed Gaudet is CEO and Founder of Censinet, which started in healthcare third-party risk management and has widened into enterprise risk, AI governance, and systemic risk. The story here is less about AI replacing people than about what happens when a health system stops managing vendors one by one and starts working from shared intelligence across a network of more than 55,000 vendors and products.
The most useful AI use case is the dull work: repetitive, documentation-heavy tasks that do not need human judgment. In healthcare, the hard part is not automation alone but knowing where a machine should stop and a person should decide.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Censinet really came from seeing a problem in healthcare that wasn’t being solved well. Health systems were becoming increasingly dependent on thousands of vendors / technologies but the process for understanding and managing the risk around them was still incredibly manual and fragmented.
We started with third-party risk management and made the decision early on to go all-in on healthcare. What makes Censinet different is the network. Instead of every health system assessing the same vendors independently and starting from zero, we’ve built a collaborative risk network where healthcare organizations can benefit from shared intelligence across more than 55,000 vendors and products. And we’ve expanded that approach beyond third-party risk into enterprise risk, AI governance, and systemic risk.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
A lot of our growth has historically been relationship-driven. Healthcare is a trust-based industry, particularly when you’re talking about cybersecurity and risk, so referrals, existing customers, partners, and the broader healthcare leadership community are incredibly important.
Where I’d like to see even more growth come from is the market recognizing the problem before we have to explain it. The industry is moving from thinking about cybersecurity as a collection of individual controls and assessments to understanding systemic risk, how a disruption at one vendor or technology can affect an entire health system. So the opportunity for us is to create more of that category-level awareness. I’d love for more organizations to come to us already understanding that traditional, point-in-time risk management isn’t enough and looking specifically for a healthcare-focused, network-based approach.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
One thing I’m very comfortable handing over to AI is the repetitive, documentation-heavy work. That’s actually a big part of how we think about AI at Censinet. If a risk analyst is spending hours doing something the machine can do in minutes, that’s probably not the best use of that person’s expertise.
Where I still pull it back to the human is judgment. I’ve experimented with using AI further into decision-making, and that’s where you realize very quickly that context matters. Particularly in healthcare, the technically correct answer isn’t always the right answer for the organization, the clinician, or the patient. I’ve said for a while that AI should be the copilot, not the autopilot. I think that distinction is becoming even more important as the technology gets better.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Absolutely in terms of what buyers know before they reach us. The amount of research somebody can do before ever talking to a salesperson has changed dramatically. They can understand the category, compare approaches, research our leadership, listen to a podcast, read about a problem, and increasingly ask an AI assistant to help them make sense of all of it.
I wouldn’t overstate ChatGPT as a major acquisition channel for us yet. I think we’re still early there. But I do think the behavior is changing, and that’s what matters. Buyers are going to expect an answer before they ever visit your website or fill out a form.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I’d tell them to start with the workflows, not the AI.
Find the repetitive work your best people are doing that doesn’t actually require their expertise. Automate that first. Then put very clear governance around what data can go into these systems, which tools employees can use, who owns the output, and where a human needs to remain in the loop.
I’d also tell them to build an inventory. You can’t govern AI you don’t know you have, and in healthcare a lot of AI is going to enter the organization through vendors and products you already use, not through some big enterprise AI initiative.
Thank you to Ed Gaudet and the team at Censinet for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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