There's been a lot of talk about AI "reasoning" lately. As the founder of ISMS Copilot, I want to cut through the hype and share some clarity on what our assistants actually do.
An expert in probabilistic AI recently shared something fascinating with me that explains the disconnect many of us feel when interacting with these systems.
Our AI assistants do "reason" – but only in a narrow, technical sense. They perform recursive probabilistic inference, calculating token-by-token which words should follow others based on statistical patterns they've observed.
Mathematically speaking, this qualifies as "reasoning" because it follows structured rules for updating probabilities. But this is worlds apart from how humans reason.
When you use ISMS Copilot's assistants, they aren't:
They're recombining existing patterns in impressive ways, but not originating genuinely new insights.
This distinction is crucial in compliance, where precision matters. When our assistant suggests a control for ISO 27001, it's not "thinking through" the implications – it's identifying statistical patterns between your question and relevant controls in its training data.
This is why we always emphasize verification. The assistant might sound confident while making a completely incorrect assertion about a framework requirement. It's not lying – it's just following probability distributions that sometimes lead to errors.
Despite these limitations, our assistants are incredibly valuable tools. They excel at: