Pragmatic AI Security Strategies for CISOs

How CISOs Can Secure and Govern AI Without Slowing Business Operations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming how organizations work, compete, and serve customers. Many enterprises are moving quickly to implement AI in their business, eager to capture productivity gains and new capabilities.

Business leaders are pressing chief information officers (CIOs) to remove barriers so they can engage with new AI solutions and providers as fast as possible. The CIO, caught in the middle, is struggling to balance the needs of the business while ensuring that the organization is adequately protected.

For the chief information security officer (CISO), this is a familiar but intensified dilemma. Most CISOs understand the significant risks and challenges AI can bring to the organization, especially in areas like data security, privacy, model integrity, and novel attack vectors such as prompt injection or data poisoning.

In response, CISOs are racing to implement robust AI security standards and protocols to protect the organization. Yet those very procedures, if applied uniformly, can slow the organization and create overhead that business leaders don’t want to absorb.

The predictable result: frustration, friction, and the temptation for teams to route around the rules, sometimes adopting “shadow AI” and thereby increasing risk.

The answer is not to slam on the brakes or to look the other way. The answer is pragmatism: a risk based model that enables speed where risk is low and applies deeper governance where risk is high.

Read the full paper