Compliance intelligence, not just another chatbot.
Cleo is RealCISO's AI reasoning engine — purpose-built for compliance teams. It reads your entire compliance graph, understands your gaps and your audit timeline, and then it acts: assessing, linking evidence, ranking fixes, drafting the board summary.
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4.8/5 across 223 reviews on SourceForge · #1 vCISO platform on G2, Summer 2026
Your compliance data, finally understood
Cleo has direct access to your compliance data graph — Controls, Risks, Evidence, Vendors, Policies and People — and to your maturity levels, regulatory requirements and audit timelines. Every recommendation it makes is grounded in your actual project data: it knows your current score, your gaps, and which remediation steps move the needle most before your audit. Then it acts, and shows its work.
Eight jobs. All grounded in your data.
Assessment guidance
Walks through each control question with context — what the control requires, why it matters, what evidence to attach — and proposes answers from documents you have uploaded, with confidence levels you confirm before anything changes.
Remediation planning
Analyzes the control-risk graph, calculates impact and generates a prioritized remediation workflow ranked by score-improvement potential. Example: 23 gaps → MFA first (+15%), access review (+8%), vendor process (+5%). Each step becomes a Planner card.
Evidence auto-linking
Drop any document anywhere — policy PDF, audit report, screenshot, vendor contract. Cleo performs OCR and semantic analysis, identifies what it is, and recommends the evidence types and controls it satisfies. Accept with one click; maturity recalculates.
Cleo Insights
Prioritized insights about each environment, ranked by severity, opening with a plain-language executive summary. Recommendations are ordered steps with effort, the failing tests each fixes, and what "done" looks like — each addable to the Planner.
Audit readiness
Ask "where are we on the SOC 2 audit?" and get a request-level answer: the open, ready and flagged requests, their owners and status — not a coverage percentage.
RFP & questionnaire response
Upload a customer questionnaire. Cleo maps your existing evidence to every question and drafts responses, flagging only the gaps you actually need to fill.
Board-ready summaries
Ranks your top risks by severity and audit proximity and generates a C-suite summary with trend lines, maturity velocity and an audit-readiness signal — or ask for an Executive Summary or Audit Readiness Report and get it in seconds.
Product recommendations
On the Security Products page Cleo ranks the tools that would advance the most controls you have not yet covered — the same order the products page shows.
A chat panel that already knows where you are
Ctrl+/ on any page
The panel slides open on the right of whatever you are looking at. Cleo knows the environment and the page, so there is no context to re-explain.
Threads that persist
Conversations are organized into named threads — "SOC 2 gap analysis", "policy review" — that survive across sessions.
Background jobs
Workflow generation, document analysis and OCR run as jobs; you are notified when they finish and the results appear where they belong.
Portfolio tools for parents
At the Consultant or Enterprise Plus level Cleo has portfolio tools instead of environment tools: client statuses, client detail, audit pipeline, team workload and engagements.
From onboarding to audit-ready in under 60 days
How a vCISO uses Cleo to onboard a new healthcare client.
Day 1 — Assessment
150 HIPAA questions in two hours, not eight. Cleo pre-fills from existing documents and flags 37 gaps at completion.
Day 2 — Remediation planning
A 37-task workflow ranked by impact: MFA first (+15% score), access review formalization (+8%), vendor assessment process (+5%). The vCISO reviews, approves and assigns.
Weeks 1–4 — Execution
The client uploads an MFA policy → Cleo links it to AC-2 and AC-3 (92%, 87% confidence) → control maturity moves L1 → L2. Timeline alerts: "task due in 3 days per audit schedule."
Week 5 — Readiness
"Access Control L3.2 — audit expects L3.0, ready. Top risk: Backup/Recovery still at L1.5. 30 days to audit." The client pivots to the right priority.
Audit day
The auditor sees a maturity journey, not a snapshot — every control, every evidence item, every improvement documented and explainable — and the open/ready/flagged request list Cleo has been tracking.
Reasoning you can trust, on terms you set
What leaves your environment
Only non-identifying context — control structure and security-profile metadata — goes to the language model. No PII, no company-identifying information, and never the content of your evidence documents.
Ephemeral by design
Sessions are not stored or used for model training once the context window lapses.
Granular off-switches
Disable Cleo entirely, disable OCR document analysis, or disable vendor-assessment analysis — per environment, or across every client tenant a consultant manages.
Explainable reasoning
Every output shows why Cleo prioritized a control, which evidence it linked, and what maturity improvement to expect. No black boxes, and never a change to a control assessment without a person making it.
Cleo FAQ
What is Cleo?
Cleo is RealCISO's AI reasoning engine. Unlike a chatbot, it has direct access to your compliance data graph — controls, risks, evidence, vendors, policies and people — and to your maturity scores, framework requirements and audit timeline. It runs assessments, links evidence, ranks remediation, drafts questionnaire responses and produces board-ready summaries, grounded in your data rather than a template.
Is my data sent to an external AI model?
Cleo sends non-identifying context — control structure and security-profile metadata — to an external language model to generate responses. It does not transmit personally identifiable information, company-identifying information, or the content of your evidence documents. Sessions are ephemeral: nothing is stored or used for training once the context window lapses. You can also switch Cleo off entirely, disable document analysis, or disable vendor-assessment analysis, per environment.
How do I talk to Cleo?
Press Ctrl+/ (Cmd+/ on Mac) or click the chat icon on any page. Cleo knows which environment and page you are on, so you never re-explain context. Conversations are organized into named threads that persist across sessions, and long-running work — workflow generation, document analysis, OCR — runs as background jobs that notify you when they finish.
What can I ask?
"What does this control require?" "What evidence should I collect for access control?" "Generate a summary of our SOC 2 readiness." "Which areas have the most unanswered questions?" "Where are we on the SOC 2 audit?" "What should we prioritize next?" — and Cleo can also answer questions about RealCISO itself from the documentation.
Does Cleo make decisions for us?
No. Every Cleo output — an answer, an evidence link, a finding, a remediation plan — is a proposal you review, accept, edit or reject. Cleo never changes a control assessment on its own, and every recommendation shows the reasoning and the data behind it.
How is Cleo different from the AI in Vanta, Drata or Cynomi?
Cleo reasons over a connected graph with maturity history on every link, so it can rank a fix by projected score impact, credit one piece of evidence across every framework, and — for service providers — read across an entire client book. AI bolted onto a flat list of controls can speed up a questionnaire; it cannot do those three things.
Go deeper on any capability
Everywhere Cleo shows up in the platform.
See Cleo work on your compliance data
Book a 30-minute demo and watch Cleo analyze your gaps, generate a remediation workflow and link evidence — live, on your actual project.
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