An assessment team does not just read your SSP. They interview your people to confirm the practices are real. The Hot Seat puts your team across the table from an AI assessor that asks the actual NIST SP 800-171A questions, probes the follow-ups, and scores how you answer. The real room becomes rehearsal, not a first take.
You don't have time to take a course. Under the interim rule, the government selects who gets assessed — you don't pick the timing, and you won't get months of notice. Skip the abstract learning paths and the cert-prep modules — practice the actual interview your team will face, against the actual NIST SP 800-171A objectives, until the answers come out clean.
Assessors interview your people for a reason: spoken answers reveal whether a control is lived or just written.
A system administrator who says "we're supposed to" instead of "we do." An HR rep whose onboarding story contradicts the SSP. A help-desk tech who volunteers a detail that opens a whole new line of questioning. None of these show up in your documentation, and every one of them can stall an assessment you spent months and real money preparing for.
Most teams walk into that interview having never rehearsed it once. The Hot Seat changes that.
Choose the role you'll play in the real assessment: system administrator, ISSO, HR, help desk, or executive sponsor. You only get the questions your seat actually owns.
An AI assessor asks real 800-171A questions out loud and probes the follow-ups, just like the room. You answer by voice or by typing, exactly as you would on assessment day.
Every answer is scored for objective coverage and delivery, with red flags for hedging, SSP contradictions, and over-disclosure, plus what a strong answer sounds like.
You closed the POA&Ms and your documentation is solid. But the documentation was the part you could control on paper. The interview is the part you can't fake, and you've never done it.
"A flawless SSP can still fail in the interview."Your nightmare isn't your own answer. It's the sysadmin and the HR rep describing the same process two different ways in front of the assessor. The Hot Seat gets every person rehearsing their piece beforehand, so the team walks in telling the same story.
"Assessors certify your people, not just your documents."You do this work every day. The challenge isn't knowing what you do, it's saying it cleanly and confidently under pressure, without hedging or wandering off scope.
"You know the controls. Now learn to say them out loud."Readiness is your product. The Hot Seat gives you a repeatable interview drill to run across every engagement, so your clients walk in rehearsed and your readiness work shows up where it counts most.
"Make interview readiness part of every engagement."Five distinct roles, each scoped to the controls and assessment objectives that role genuinely owns.
Speak your answers and hear the assessor speak the questions, so you practice delivery, not just recall.
Objective coverage and delivery confidence on every answer, scored the way an assessment team would weigh it.
Paste your SSP language and the assessor flags any spoken answer that drifts from what you've claimed.
Hedging, scope creep, and over-disclosure are caught and explained before an assessor ever hears them.
Questions map to specific NIST SP 800-171A assessment objectives, not vague interview coaching.
The Hot Seat is a Globe-America Consulting product. We're a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business based in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, focused on getting small and mid-size DIB contractors assessment-ready without a Fortune 500 budget. The Hot Seat is the Defend pillar of our GARD Framework, made practical.
Pay once to get your own team ready, or subscribe to drill clients across every engagement. Plans marked Coming Soon are on the roadmap.
No. CMMC Hot Seat is a conversation-based rehearsal tool, not a scanning or discovery tool. It never connects to your systems, your network, or your environment. It asks interview questions and scores the answers your people type or speak. Think flight simulator, not vulnerability scanner.
No system access. There is no installed agent, no network connector, no file-share integration, and no scan of any kind. The tool runs in your browser and our scoring service. It has no path to your environment.
No discovery capability. The tool cannot learn where your CUI is stored, how your network is segmented, or what your configurations are. It has no mechanism to find that out, because it never connects to anything on your side to look.
It only sees what you type. The single way CUI-adjacent detail could enter the tool is if a user deliberately types or speaks it into an answer. That is why we coach teams to rehearse the shape of an answer, never the live evidence behind it.
When an answer is scored, the question, the answer text, and the assessment objective are sent to Anthropic with no identity and no account context, and Anthropic does not train on it. The full detail is in our Privacy & Data Handling document.
The Hot Seat is rolling out to Defense Industrial Base contractors and CMMC advisors. Request early access and we'll get your team in the chair.