Onebrief is an AI-powered software platform built for military operational planning. Its collaboration and workflow features help command teams build plans, briefs, and orders to keep everyone aligned, and its creative ideation features let them test new concepts safely and faster than traditional manual methods.

A lot of manual work for a lean team

Because Onebrief serves a compliance-heavy industry (government and defense), they prioritized hiring a governance, risk, & compliance (GRC) team earlier than most organizations do.

Originally, the team consisted of a few people, who were responsible for the company's ongoing security and compliance. For a while, they were able to get by with training they created themselves, using basic spreadsheets for tracking.

But as Onebrief secured larger funding rounds and headcount grew, it was clear the GRC team's manual process wasn't going to cut it long-term.

“For a while, using spreadsheets to track training was fine. But over time, the sprawl became a big issue. And it was only going to get worse as we added more people to the team and managed more complex compliance requirements.”

The team knew about training platforms like KnowBe4, but those felt like a big investment given how much time they'd have to spend setting up and maintaining the system over time. Plus, they weren't so sure about employee buy-in. Per Stefany Pratt, Onebrief's Director of Corporate IT and Security:

“Like many companies, we experienced pushback when suggesting we start boring, hour-long training sessions that nobody would retain, just to be ‘compliant.’”

A one-of-a-kind solution

Onebrief's GRC team entered vendor evaluation with a clear vision of what they wanted: a training tool that would streamline the process of creating new training, deliver those trainings in a unique way, and, if possible, automatically store the results in a place they could reference later.

They happened to discover Herd in its pre-launch phase and were struck by:

  • How fast it was to spin up new trainings. All they had to do was share security policies and write a quick prompt about what kind of compliance training they needed. Herd would generate training videos, microlessons, and quizzes tailored specifically to each individual's role, where they were located, and the company's overall risk profile. Ideal for managing emerging internal or external security threats.
  • How easy it was to customize. They could ask Herd to make any changes they wanted with a simple natural language prompt, then deploy the new training to the entire organization in a few clicks.
  • How seamlessly it would fit into their existing stack. Herd plugs straight into Slack, a tool the Onebrief team was using every minute of every day. Getting a reminder to take a 5-minute compliance training would be more like a fun break than a distraction, and employees wouldn't have to log into any separate system to stay compliant.

Even more impressive, the Herd team assured them set up happened in no time. With all these potential pros, it was hard for the GRC team not to try Herd out.

Up and running (and audit-ready) fast

Herd delivered on its promise. Within minutes, Onebrief connected Herd to their security policies, created a test training module, and distributed it to the entire team via their org's Slack.

Employees got a DM from Herd inviting them to take the training, clicked start, and went through the prompts. Simple as that.

Even better, they could see that Herd was keeping tabs on employee activity, automatically logging the test trainings that got completed so that the team could reference the data at any time. In a business that must prove compliance to government auditors, being able to pull audit evidence available on demand would be a game-changer.

Excited by the process, the GRC team created their own rapid-response training just to see how long it would take. They pulled up Herd, typed in a prompt, made some refinements, and released new, quick training to the team in a matter of minutes.

“I expected a standard template editor, but instead, I could describe what I want our team to learn in plain English, and Herd generated high-quality, relevant training modules instantly,” Stefany notes.

“The frictionless transition from ‘We have a new security goal’ to ‘The team is trained on it’ on Herd completely blew me away.”

From a new threat to company-wide response in 10 minutes

The test proved how quick it was to build and deploy a targeted alert. But the team wanted to know it would work with a real, super specific example.

So they decided to turn a real-life emerging threat into a training. After 10 minutes of prompting and refining, the training was up and ready to be distributed to the team.

“Before, when a critical vulnerability came to our attention, spinning up a training module would take days or weeks. With Herd, we built and deployed a targeted alert within minutes,” Stefany shares.

And it worked. With hyperpersonalized, bite-sized modules delivered directly in Slack, security training felt more fun, more interactive—something that employees were actually excited to participate in.

“Instead of clicking ‘dismiss,’ our team actively engaged,” Stefany emphasizes. “We had a flood of employees reaching out directly to our security team to ask for guidance on how to protect themselves. It transformed a passive threat into an active, company-wide hardening effort.”

Making security a “team sport”

Shortly after, the team rolled out phishing training, and employees were enthusiastic about that, too. They started proactively flagging and posting suspicious activity into a dedicated security channel to warn their colleagues.

“Our employees now spot and report suspicious activity so quickly that it's become a team-wide reflex. That kind of proactive, crowd-sourced defense is exactly the behavior you want to see,” says Stefany.

In just a few months, Herd was already helping the company shift from compliance as a checkbox to security culture as a practice. Per Stefany, “Security has shifted from an isolated IT responsibility to a collective team sport.”

What's next

Onebrief got so much use out of Herd in its first year that renewing was a no-brainer. As the company has continued to grow, it reached unicorn status following its Series C extension in the summer of 2025.

With a larger employee base, Herd has expanded into other teams, creating training opportunities for teams beyond compliance. As Colten O'Malley, Onebrief's CIO, puts it:

“Herd has been one of the biggest positive spends for cybersecurity. If you want to move past the compliance theater and actually build a proactive security culture without burning hours on ineffective training, Herd is the real deal.”

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