Are we less automated than the big platforms?

No. Bring-your-own-model means your automation ceiling is the best frontier model, not a vendor's fixed in-house agent. The approval gate is defensibility, not friction.

The question usually comes from comparing Kanonik to platforms like Vanta, Drata, or Sprinto, which run their own in-house agent to collect evidence and map it to controls. It is a fair question, and the worry behind it points the wrong way once you look at where the automation actually comes from.

Your ceiling is the model, not a vendor

Those tools run one agent that the vendor built and cost-manages across their whole customer base. Whatever that agent can do is your ceiling, and it moves at the vendor's pace.

Kanonik runs on the frontier model you already use: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, AWS Bedrock, or Azure OpenAI. Your ceiling is the best model available to you, and it rises every time the model behind it improves, with no work on your part. A vendor competing on model capability against the frontier labs is in a race it cannot win; you are simply riding the winner.

The approval gate is the point, not a missing feature

Kanonik does not silently apply what the model produces. Every change runs through a non-bypassable, server-side Verifier, then waits for a single-use, signed approval from a named person before it lands. That is not less automation. It is provable human oversight, and it is exactly what stands up in an audit when the reasoning was done by AI. Black-box autonomy is the thing an auditor is skeptical of; a recorded approval bound to the exact change is the thing that answers the skepticism.

Kanonik holds no keys to your systems

The automation platforms hold standing credentials into your cloud, identity provider, and repositories so their agent can collect evidence. Kanonik holds none of your cloud or source-system credentials. Your own AI reaches your systems through its own tools and its own access, and Kanonik only ever receives what your AI proposes to write into your record. Your systems stay yours, and there is no third-party credential surface to secure.

More help

Browse every article in the Help center, where you can also ask the Kanonik assistant directly. For anything else, email [email protected] and a person who works on the product answers.