On the 36th episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton talk with Chris Leigh, VP and Chief Information Security Officer at Eversource Energy. Chris leads security for a regulated, high-stakes utility serving millions across New England. He also owns AI in an uncommon org design that he uses to prove a point: governance does not have to slow innovation if it is built like an engineering function, with repeatable guardrails and clear pathways to ship.

Quick hits from Chris:

​​On shipping AI faster with standardization: “And that’s allowed us to accelerate our time to delivery by orders of magnitude of three months, down to four weeks, down to two weeks for various sprints.”

On preventing outages with drone inspection: “We’ve put some patterns out on this that allows us to better bring in the imagery and run it through our models and pick up damaged components or hotspots in the wires, which allows us to schedule and do repairs before we actually have power outages.”

​​On transforming threat intel into action for the SOC: “Any IOCs get popped into our tools automatically.”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/.

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Abnormal Studios.

On the 35th episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser (co-founder and CEO, Abnormal AI) and Mike Britton (CIO, Abnormal AI) talk with Adam Keown, Chief Information Security Officer at Eastman Chemical Company. Adam draws on a career in law enforcement and global enterprise security to explain how Eastman is safeguarding life-critical manufacturing through identity-first defense, AI-informed education, and resilience engineering, staying ahead of a dynamic threat landscape.

Quick hits from Adam:

On aligning cyber with manufacturing outcomes: “Cybersecurity here at Eastman has two main pillars: make sure the business continues running, and protect our intellectual property. That gives us an advantage in the market.”

On evolving attack surfaces: “Identity is the new attack surface, and privilege is the blast radius.”

On adaptive education: “One of the nicest compliments I’ve gotten was a VP saying: ‘Your security newsletter is so concise it’s faster to read than to file away’.”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/.

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.

On the 34th episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser (co-founder and CEO, Abnormal AI) and Mike Britton (CISO, Abnormal AI) talk with Micah Czigan, Chief Information Security Officer at Georgetown University. Micah shares how Georgetown is navigating AI adoption with security-first thinking, tailored governance, and a mindset rooted in experimentation. From piloting secure internal AI tools to defending against deepfakes and hyper-personalized phishing, Micah’s approach protects people while embracing innovation.

Quick hits from Micah:

On AI-powered phishing: “Phishing emails now look personal. AI is building profiles and crafting messages that feel targeted, not blasted.”

On governance that enables adoption: “Shadow AI happens when people don’t feel they have a path to yes. We’re focused on building that path.”

On personalized AI defense models: “We're profiling advisory targets to understand risk not just by email but web activity too, and that’s all AI-powered.”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/.

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.

On Episode 33 of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser (CEO and co-founder, Abnormal AI) and Mike Britton (CIO, Abnormal AI) sit down with Lester Godsey, Chief Information Security Officer at Arizona State University, to discuss how ASU is building an ambitious, campus-wide AI strategy. With more than 200,000 users, ASU has deployed an in-house platform supporting 60+ language models and has granted all students and staff access to ChatGPT. Godsey outlines ASU’s strong governance framework, proactive security controls, and threat modeling to address risks such as prompt injection and insider misuse, while highlighting student-driven innovation through hackathons and grants that promote responsible AI experimentation in cybersecurity.

Quick hits from Lester:

On AI threat acceleration: "It’s not net new attacks, we’re just seeing them executed faster, more effectively. The deepfakes in 2024 aren’t funny anymore."

On internal innovation: "We built our own platform supporting over 60 large language models, with walled garden controls and ethical guardrails."

On AI’s future impact: “We’re training a model to ingest messy threat intel from all sources and separate the good from the bad. That’s how small teams can finally take action with confidence.”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/.

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer

On the 32nd episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser (CEO, co-founder at Abnormal AI) and Mike Britton (CIO, Abnormal AI) talk with Yaron Levi, CISO at Dolby. They unpack the enduring basics of cyber, how agentic AI can help teams move faster, and why excellent security starts with the business mission. Yaroni argues that most incidents still trace to old problems and that progress in the AI era begins with operational discipline, explicit threat modeling, and automation, where it truly reduces risk. He lays out a pragmatic sequence that starts with business goals, maps how things can go wrong, selects countermeasures, and then reconciles ambitions with real budgets.

Quick hits from Yaron:

On AI’s role in defense at scale: “We need to be able to embrace and figure out how we can automate more, how we can leverage those technologies to help us defend better and really tackle that the technical debt mountain… maybe with some AI, agentic AI, maybe we have some chances to deal with it better.”

On why breaches still happen: “Unpatched systems, misconfigurations, compromised credentials, RDP, open RDP, the RDP that somebody left out there.”

On preventing AI agent blind spots: “Do you know what your inventory is? Back then it was devices, then cloud workloads and virtual machines and other Kubernetes or whatnot. And now it’s like agents, okay? If we’re going to suck at managing the agent’s inventory, the same way we [sucked at] managing, you know, device inventory, we are going to have a big problem.”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where security, privacy, and safety leaders share how they are protecting the world from AI-powered threats. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/.

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.

On the 31st episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser, CEO and co-founder of Abnormal AI, and Mike Britton, CIO at Abnormal AI, sit down with Sue Lapierre, Head of IT Governance & Information Security Officer at Prologis. With 1.3 billion square feet of logistics real estate and $3.2 trillion in goods moving through its facilities, Prologis faces extraordinary stakes. Sue shares how her security team is proactively responding, embedding AI safely across the business while running simulated deepfakes to stress-test resilience. She explains how zero trust begins with human awareness, how internal AI policies ensure transformational security, and why cybersecurity today demands curiosity, not fear.

Quick hits from Sue:

On zero trust being human-first: “We have to also think about zero trust, not only on the technical side, but on the human side.

On internal GPT adoption and focus: “At the very beginning… we locked down all AI except our internal AI Prologis GPT. That helped to focus people into one vector.”​​​​​​​

On simulating deepfake attacks: “We actually hired a third party that created deepfakes and targeted a variety of individuals… we wanted to test if someone fell for it, would they fall all the way… or do we have defenses that would stop it?”

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer

On the 30th episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Mike Britton and Evan Reiser talk with Martin Strasburger, Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer at Duke Energy. Martin shares how Duke, serving over 11 million customers across the Southeast, protects vital physical and digital infrastructure in a time of accelerating energy demand and technological change. He emphasizes the critical role of intelligence‑driven defense in both cyber and physical spheres. From ballistic attacks on substations to AI-driven grid resilience and deepfake threats, Martin offers a nuanced perspective on how modern security challenges require both technological expertise and human intelligence.

Quick hits from Martin

On his protective mission at Duke: "Being able to protect… our people, our data, our systems, keep that power on… that's a satisfying feeling when you're successful."

On AI’s impact across the industry: “We’re piloting technology that can look across multiple facilities… and try to identify a group that is surveilling our facilities, doing pre-operational surveillance for a future attack, and intervene, interdict, and prevent an attack.”

On deepfake and phone‑based threats: "The use of AI in social engineering is my biggest concern. So much of that is outside of my control as the security leader… When you’ve got a bad actor doing a call to somebody's mobile device, my only line of defense in that case is that person. Have we trained them? Are they aware that they shouldn’t fall for that phishing call?"

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where security, privacy, and safety leaders share how they’re protecting the world from AI‑powered threats. Find more great insights from technology leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.

On the 29th episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, host Mike Britton, Chief Information Security Officer at Abnormal AI, talks with Vaughn Hazen, Chief Information Security Officer at ​​the Canadian National Railway Company. CN is Canada’s largest rail operator and the only one that spans the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf coasts, running over 20,000 miles across North America. In this conversation, Vaughn shares what it takes to defend one of North America’s largest freight railroads in an era of deepfakes, automated phishing, and machine-speed threats. He discusses why secure processes (not just smart tools) are critical to cyber resilience, how AI is changing the threat landscape and workforce dynamics, and why treating email as a notification system is a foundational shift. Vaughn’s approach blends military discipline, telecom roots, and a strong belief in long-term readiness over reactive fixes.

Quick hits from Vaughn:

On the fragility of process in an AI-driven threat landscape: “Email should be a notification, not necessarily the process... there's just gotta be a robust process that makes it very, very difficult where you're gonna have to be able to compromise a slew of people in order to really breach that”.

On the slow burn of real security preparation: “You can’t plant the seeds and expect to harvest in the same day… a lot of the stuff that we do to prepare for a potential event is stuff that we've got to be doing in advance”.

On AI’s false promise of autonomy: “It’s not something that just works on its own... You've got to have people that are knowledgeable... to say, first of all, does this make sense? Are we seeing a hallucination?”.

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise AI Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog.

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer