Axari Brings AI Chief of Staff to Cybersecurity

Hey, everyone. We are back here at Platform Con in New York City, enjoying the day. It's a beautiful day.

We've got a beautiful view, as I said earlier. For those who don't know, this woman here is Carolyn Wong. She is a longtime friend of mine that I've known for a very long time, hence longtime friend, and just a phenomenal person.

We're going to talk about her with her in a second. But I want to introduce this young lady behind us here. Her name is Sue, and Sue is Carolyn's daughter.

And the fact that she's Carolyn's daughter would be special enough, but let me give you a quick story. Every year at RSA, we do our DevSecOps event. I think we're going on 11 or 12 years now.

Already done. The next year will be 12. 11 years ago, I have a speaker, this woman I meet named Carolyn Wong, who they said, "She'll be there.

" I think Chenxi had said- Introduced her ... " And then I get up there to introduce her, and from the back of the room comes this woman, literally- Very pregnant ... eight and a half months pregnant.

Extremely pregnant. " I don't know nothing about birthing no babies. " It could happen on stage.

That's how pregnant I was. Slowly walking up the aisle. We helped her up the stairs.

She stood up, and she just knocked it dead, killer presentation as she's want to does. I've seen her do many times. So the karma wheel goes round and round.

This young girl was at that event 10 or 11 years ago. Unbelievable. So crazy.

So Sue, what have you been doing since then? Well, I obviously have school. I do many extracurriculars.

Like jujitsu, maybe? I do jujitsu, gymnastics, piano, and sometimes my school will have math competitions that I will attend. Uh-huh.

What about, I know you have two very big dogs. Oh, yeah. We have one Rottweiler mix and two Mastiffs.

Yes. Very big dogs. I've seen them on Facebook.

But your mom tells me you're also working with AI. Oh, yeah. Sometimes I'll use ChatGPT to help me do my schoolwork, or write notes to people, or just make notes in general.

Very cool. Is this your first time in New York? Yeah.

This is my first time. What do you think? Well, it's pretty nice except for I don't like that I have to walk around because it makes my legs hurt and- You got a lot of years of walking around ahead of you.

I don't want to tell you. Oh, it's pretty great. Just looking at this view in downtown- It's very pretty ...

world financial centers and so forth, it's pretty awesome buildings here, huh? Yeah. They're really pretty.

Very cool. We're going to talk to your mom a little bit. All right?

Yep. All right. So there you have it.

Using AI at 11. That pretty much sums up where we are in this world, Carolyn. Yes, it does.

Tell us, well, last time we checked in on you, you had recently left the last company you were with, which shall remain nameless, and you were doing a couple of different things. You actually went to the other side from the vendor side to end user. That's right.

So 20 years on cybersecurity, I've spent about two-thirds of my time on the vendor solution side, about a third of the time on the in-house side. Most recently was chief of staff for CISO Billy Spears. That's exactly it.

Yeah. And- Great leader, great human And now... And then I sort of couldn't stay away from the solution provider side.

Like moth to the flame. Particularly in this age of AI, when things are changing so incredibly rapidly. Mm-hmm.

I had begun to do research for my book, "The AI Cybersecurity Handbook," which was published in March. Right. Yep.

And I thought to myself, "There are so many fun, hot startups popping up. " You can build anything. And I had been human chief of staff for CISOs Dave Cullinane, for CISO Billy Spears.

" Yeah. And now we're doing the thing. We've got customers.

We've got deployments. So- It's really, really fun ... are they cloning you?

You know what? My talk today at Platform Con is actually about digital twins and synthetic workers. Right.

So one of the most interesting questions for us from a cybersecurity perspective is what about permissions, and what about identity management? And what happens when we're effectively giving these robots the same access as we ourselves have? What does that mean- Mm-hmm ...

for security? And I'll be talking about that on the main stage in just about 30 minutes. And it'll be available on-demand.

Maybe by the time you watch this video, if you head over to Platform Con, you could probably watch the on-demand version as well, because people watching this almost by definition aren't here. That makes perfect sense. Yes.

So how to- Check it out at Platform Con ... we're on from New York. So the company's X-R-E?

Axari, A-X-A-R-I. Axari, A-X-A-R-I. Correct.

What's the website? ai. If you're interested in trying it out, you can reach me and our team through the website.

We'd be thrilled to tell you all about it. I want to jump more into it, but while we're doing a couple of plugs, the book did come out in March. Yes.

" Now, look, you've written other books prior to this. You've written, I think, the most successful security LinkedIn course. There was a security metrics book that came out in 2011- Yep ...

that was inducted into the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame in 2022. Yep. I do continue to teach on LinkedIn Learning, and I think at this stage, hundreds of thousands of learners have watched my courses.

I continue to make coursework. Certainly, everything is changing with AI. Yeah.

And so I just really enjoy learning about it, and sharing what I learn with others. Sue, I've got to ask you. You thought you were done.

You're not done yet. What do you think about your mom when you hear about all these great things she's done? I think it's cool that when she's really old, she won't get scammed by scam callers.

But she's not really old yet, right? Getting there. She's not really old yet, I don't think.

That's right. Does it make you want to work in tech and security? No, not really, because I think I would get bored if I had to be on the computer all day.

But going to all the- I hope you never lose that. Or going to the adventure school. What do you think you want to do when you grow up?

When I grow up, I want to be a pediatrician. Really? Yeah.

What did you use ChatGPT to do recently with regards to being a pediatrician? I recently used ChatGPT to look up what college and medical school I could potentially go to. And ChatGPT was very helpful, and we found one that's only three hours away from my home, and it's- A college or medical school?

College and medical school. College and medical school. Oh, only three hours from your home.

Do they have ducks or beavers in the mascots? We're not a sports family, but we are in the Portland area, and UDub, it seems, has a great pre-med school and a great medical school program- Very good ... per ChatGPT.

Very cool. Very cool. Also surprisingly affordable compared to other options.

Well, when you go in-state. Absolutely. In-state is the way to go.

I learned this lesson, too. Both my boys went to the University of Florida, which at the time was the fifth-rated public school in the country. And because it was in-state, and because I had put money away when they were born, literally, I just had to pay frat fees, basically.

Amazing. But my deal with them is if they went in-state and I didn't have to pay huge tuition- Yeah ... I would help them if they wanted grad school or medical school or law school.

And both boys, one boy has a master's and just graduated law school in May. And the other one is getting his master's in broadcast journalism. Amazing.

Look, at 11 years old, to know what you want to be is a fantastic thing. Carolyn, let's talk more about the company. Let's talk about the company.

The CEO is Prasann Shilar. He was on the Demisto team as the first product manager. Really?

He himself built more than 500 security tool integrations. Okay. Our CTO is Dr.

Shaoyun Xu. She graduated with a doctorate in machine learning from Caltech. She has more than 30 patents to her name.

Wow. And I just met these folks, and I was like: "You're brilliant. I want to work with you.

" Yeah. Something that I've seen over the years is cybersecurity professionals, they burn out. Yes, they do.

There is way too much work and way too little time. " With our AI agents, we really hope to flip that. We really want the AI agents to be doing the drudgery work so the humans can focus on the strategy work.

Absolutely. And that's really the whole point. All the talk about AI taking your job and replacing you, that's not the point of it.

The point of it is to 3X you. Absolutely. Let that automatable work be automated, if automatable is a word, and let you focus on something that makes sense for you, that is of a higher value, at the very least.

I'll confession here. I've been using an AI EA, executive assistant- Phenomenal ... for the last month and a half.

My calendar has never been run better. My schedule's never been run better. My email responses are on target because I get over 500 emails.

Everybody's pitching, and s**t. Oh, I'm sure. You wake up in the morning, and overnight you've got hundreds of unread messages.

All the people in Europe and they're email. And out of all of those Two of them are going to be important- Signal to noise. Right ...

but you have to find them. But she now, I call her she because I named her Krystal. I love it.

K-R-I-S-T-A-L. Anyway, she's learned how to figure out which of the kinds of things I'm interested in, which I'm not. And where before, if I wasn't interested in a pitch from a PR agency, I basically just hit delete.

Right. " Now, every one of my emails is getting an answer. It's really cool.

And what's interesting also is I don't know how many people realize she's an AI and how many people just think she's Krystal. But no matter what they think, I have never been this tight, this dialed in- Yeah ... on managing my thing.

That's just an EA for me. Yeah. It's a superpower.

Right. Imagine what it could be, though, for a CISO. Right.

Or someone who has real stuff to do. Yeah. Xari, we've got kind of the intellectual property in Xari comes from our private network of CISO advisors.

Yep. And so their brains have created a set of synthetic cyber workers that come embedded in the platform. Yep.

They already know how to do these security jobs, and they can take all of the grunt work off your plate. And there's a chief of staff interface, so it's very straightforward and easy to use. Chief of staff interface.

Explain that to me. When I worked with Dave Cullinane, we had such complementary skill sets. We have such complementary skill sets.

Dave is absolutely brilliant, a total genius, a little bit chaotic. And what I brought to the team when I was his chief of staff is I was extremely highly organized and very action-oriented, just get stuff done. And so Dave would come up with brilliant ideas, and I would turn them into slides.

We would present them together. That's how, in 2008, we got eBay to switch up the security budget from $2 million to $30 million. Wow.

Significant. Money well spent, though. Money well needed at the time.

Undoubtedly. Yeah. Undoubtedly.

I remember those early days at eBay then. " It's that important. " Yeah.

With Billy Speirs, Billy's running the team, doing all of the day-to-day work. Every day, there's a new question, a new discussion from an important stakeholder, whether that be another executive, a regulator, an auditor. He's got board decks to prepare.

He's got QBRs to prepare for. And so that's the work that, as a human chief of staff, I'm assisting with. Right.

I was able to physically be in the rooms that he could not physically be in. " And that's what we're able to do with Xari. Really.

So I got to ask you an honest question, though. Is it still based mostly on you, though? I will say that in my role at the company, I've had a significant input to it based on having been in the chief of staff role- Multiple times ...

absolutely. And so there's a lot, in fact, the CEO's partner- Mm-hmm ... she's an EA, and so we have an EA built into the system as well.

Really? Oh, okay. Very cool Which naturally, she's had a tremendous amount of input on.

Input on that. And so, yeah, it will be very interesting, I think, to see how people take it and then make it their own because it might start out kind of like me. Well, of course.

Yeah. Right ... kind of like some reflection of our CISO advisory committee.

But over time, it will become more and more and more like the teams that use it. And today, that's really where I think the value comes from, is in the harness and in the memory. Yeah.

Right. Of learning. For chief of staff of CISOs, doesn't have to be today it's CISOs, tomorrow it's CTOs- Yeah ...

CPOs, whatever. For anyone out there, really, though, that's kind of worrying, "Is this the end of my career? " Does this truly replace the chief of staff, or does it augment the chief of staff?

In my opinion, is it is fully an augmentation. When I think about my role as chief of staff, before really getting to use AI, what would take me eight hours could take me two hours. So if I'm 4X'ing my productivity, and if I'm able to spend my sort of precious brain time- Mm-hmm ...

on the important items that need it, that's actually, I hope folks will watch my on-demand talk here at Platform Con, because what becomes extremely critical is the human-in-the-loop oversight and the choice of where do you put that. Where do you put that, and where do you enforce it? Because if I've got a digital twin that has all the access that I do, then I'm also accountable for what my digital twin performs.

Absolutely. It's got to be logged. It's got to be gated.

And so we have to think differently about these security controls. Yeah. So that So we can probably do a whole session just on that.

How do our security... Yes, you have zero trust. Yes, you have all these things.

But there's a fundamental change coming to how we do security controls in the age of AI that we need to, as an industry, hit head-on. What worked, or what was normal then is not going to be normal now, and certainly not tomorrow. And maybe we'll talk more about that.

You mentioned you're getting on stage here in a little bit, but you have two sessions, no? I do. So I'll be giving a talk, and then I'm also on a panel today, where we're talking about the intersection of platform and security engineering.

Because we did a panel this morning on Mythos and Vulnerability Apocalypse. " Oh, I would've loved to. We had- I would've loved to ...

a good panel on some good security. I would've been there. I'm sure you did.

That's okay. Let me go off work for a second. Great.

You're doing a jujitsu thing yourself. I am. Tell us.

I was so surprised. My husband- I know he was in it ... did wrestling in high school.

Okay. He got into jujitsu. The kids got into jujitsu.

We just adore our local gym and our professor coach. And I said to him, "Coach Gil, I'm not really into the idea of rolling around with sweaty dudes, but when the gym gets big enough that you're able to have an all-women's class, I will- Oh, exalted ... " See there who it is.

And I fell in love. And I have not even ever really been an athlete, let alone a fighting- A warrior ... spirits person.

Yeah. And there is this part of me that was just waiting to be uncovered and revealed, and I cannot believe how fun it is. Inside the skin beats the heart of a warrior.

Oh my gosh. You know? It's like the perfect complement to sitting in front of screens all day.

Right. Is literally- It's physical ... fighting for your life.

Yeah. Literally. Well, not really.

Not really. You know what I mean. Because you tap, and they stop.

Yeah. But it's extremely physical, and no one can do it for you. No.

It's mono... Well, person to person. Yes.

You're aware, right, at Black Hat every year, Jeremiah Grossman does the Brazilian jujitsu thing. We are sponsoring. XRE is sponsoring.

You are? Very cool. Yes.

I am glad to hear it. I can't wait. It was actually really funny because I've heard of Jeremiah Grossman's event.

I've never attended. I've never attended either, but I remember the first time they did it. We should go this year together.

" And before I realized it was sort of more of an open mat, it's actually not- It is ... a competition sort of thing. No.

But I just signed up. Well, it's fun in that way. Absolutely.

It's a different vibe, and a really good one. Yeah. Jeremiah's a great guy for that, though, too.

I love... He's been doing it a long, long time. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Viv Hoff used to do it a lot with him. I don't know if Chris comes out to it anymore, but- Oh, I don't know ...

Hoff originally, I think it was him and Jeremiah started it. Oh my gosh. Okay.

I did not know that. Yeah. I'm pretty sure.

And I will need to reach out. Reach out. And ask them each to- I don't know if Chris does it, but she may not go, but- ...

roll with me because, yeah, you start doing something like BJJ, and then you find out everyone who does it- It's a small community, and it's a tight- ... either Tier Notches is a fricking brown belt. Really?

There are people, and you have no idea, but they are literally killers, and they're just doing Zoom meetings just like the rest of... It's so much fun to just learn about all these different parts of people. Absolutely.

But let me just bring this full circle. We've talked before about burnout and security. Mm-hmm.

This is part of it. When you're in security, look, a lot of it, you don't get a lot of attaboys. You know what I mean?

You don't get a lot of pats on the back. If nothing happened- Very few gold stars. Right.

If nothing happened, you did your job. But when something happens, you're the prime suspect. And jujitsu, because it's physical, you're expending energy, you're getting it out of your system.

It's a great way of fighting burnout. People need to have hobbies like this. Especially physical ones.

Not playing jujitsu on a Xbox or something, or Sony PlayStation. But physically doing things is so important. Yes.

Grounding. Whatever your thing is, pickleball, yoga. Do something.

Yes. I agree with it. Archery, something, anything.

Anything physical. We are physical beings. We're not just brains inside of bodies.

We are animal creatures. Otherwise, this is why you wind up with things like burnout. Right, Sue?

Dr. Sue? What?

We were just talking about burnout. Do you have any perspectives on burnout? What do you mean by burnout?

Burnout, like when you get overworked and when you get stressed out. You've been doing the same job so long. I don't know if you have any experience with that because you're 11 years old.

That doesn't really happen to me with- And let's hope it never does ... see. And you know what, but that's the promise of this new world we're living in.

Yeah. They'll be able to do unbelievable things. They'll be able to do so much.

Yes. All right. Carolyn, the book is out.

The LinkedIn courses are out. XRE is out. Did your jujitsu sponsorship at Black Hat.

The jujitsu. Did we leave anything else out? I think we're good for now, and- That's all ...

in a week's time, there will be all sorts of new stuff to talk about. Always something else in the life... I follow her on Facebook, LinkedIn, everywhere.

" Wow. Anyway, hey, we're here at Platform Con. We're going to be back with more at Techstrong TV.

You're watching it.