CXO Spotlight

Karen Kaukol, CMO at Entrust, explains how to market trust and identity security when both the threat (deepfakes, AI fraud) and the defense are powered by AI. Karen spent 17 years at First Data managing digital marketing through an IPO and portfolio transformation, then joinedEntrust nearly a decade ago as CMO to lead marketing strategy for a global digital identity and security leader protecting the world's most critical transactions across 150 countries.Key Insights:■■ Why candor beats hype when marketing security. Enterprise buyers are tired of fear-mongering and AI buzzwords. They respect vendors who shoot straight about what's working, what's uncertain, and where the real risks live.■■ The paradox: defending against AI-powered attacks while using AI to market that defense. Both threaten and protect at scale. The key is transparency about how you're using AI and honest acknowledgment of what you don't yet know.■■ Buying committees have exploded to 14-17 cross-functional people who tune out jargon. You must always reframe back to the business problem you're solving, not the technical terminology.■■ Brand awareness is a revenue lever, not a cost center. Most marketers can't prove the connection. Karen shows how to build a funnel from awareness to preference to consideration to revenue, then prove it with real customer data to your board.■■ AI-enabled video production costs one fifth of traditional agencies ($100K vs $500K) and delivers 60% faster with better iteration cycles. In-house creative plus boutique agency plus AI tools creates multiplying effect.■■ The real differentiator is trust, built through learning communities, thought leadership, and third-party validation. Owning the conversation before the sales funnel means your brand becomes the discovery engine.Timestamps:00:01 Introduction01:03 Karen's 30-year career arc through product, marketing, and innovation02:53 What Entrust does: securing identity across the full lifecycle04:21 Scale of Entrust's reach: every credit card, corporate login, banking transaction05:20 Karen's CMO scope: product, brand, performance, communications06:39 How Entrust uses AI as core to marketing workflows07:52 The brand campaign that cost one fifth the traditional budget08:58 Buyers using AI to research before ever visiting your website10:35 The paradox: defending against AI while using AI to market12:46 Enterprise buyers are tired of hype and fear-mongering14:59 Why candor and transparency win over bold promises15:57 The jargon tax problem: explaining post-quantum cryptography to non-technical buyers17:58 Reframing security concepts to business outcomes not technical specs19:25 Three phases of buyer journey: awareness, trust, conversion22:37 What activities belong in each phase with real examples25:36 Building the Identity Thread: owned community as competitive advantage26:57 Quality over volume in content strategy for sophisticated buyers27:16 Moving beyond vanity metrics to actual revenue impact KPIs30:51 How to prove brand impact to board with funnel data33:48 Zero-based budgeting: reject inertia, allocate based on business case36:48 Portfolio A-book/B-book analysis forces focus over spray-and-pray40:05 What's increasing: website optimization for AI, selective in-person events42:28 What's decreasing: volume of content, commoditized brand campaigns43:20 Behind the scenes: AI video production under 100K in 60% less time47:32 What marketing skills matter most in AI era: critical thinking, judgment, curation49:30 What excites Karen about next three years of security automationlFollow Chirag Khanijau: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chirag-khanijau #TrustMarketing #AI #CybersecurityMarketing #IdentitySecurity #B2BMarketing #EnterpriseMarketing#ContentMarketing #BrandBuilding #MarketingLeadership #BuyerJourney #ThoughtLeadership #DigitalTransformation

Dennis Kozak, CEO of Ivanti, explains why endpoint management goes autonomous before customer-facing AI, why the patch apocalypse changes the math for every Fortune 500, and what makes buyers choose when seat-based licensing breaks under one-person-to-many-agents.Dennis spent 22 years at CA Technologies through a company that ran 200+ acquisitions over 40 years, then drove 70% of Avaya's revenue as global channel chief. Three years ago he joined Ivanti as COO, became CEO on January 1, 2025, and now runs the platform 30,000 enterprises and 120 million users rely on for the operational backbone of IT and security. He is shipping autonomous IT operations across endpoints, ITSM, and security ops with two major 2026 product launches thatship the thesis.KEY INSIGHTS:◼️ Why endpoint management goes autonomous before help desk or security ops (and what changes inside the IT department when it does)◼️ How the 72-hour patch reverse-engineering window rewrites the math for every Fortune 500 patching cycle◼️ What 30,000 enterprise customers actually look like when one Ivanti POC found 80% of devices missing significant patches and some had never been patched in years◼️ Why the GSI managed services revenue stream consolidates fastest under autonomous IT, and which service lines get repriced◼️ How AI native thinking differs from AI powered thinking inside Fortune 500 ITSM teams (the reframe most CIOs miss)◼️ What variable-metric pricing replaces seat-based licensing when one person manages many agents and the help desk shrinks from 10 people to one with a good agentTIMESTAMPS:00:00 Teaser01:30 Intro01:44 Main Episode02:46 The 22-Year Operator Arc: CA, Avaya, Ivanti04:14 The Real Bet Behind “Embedding AI in Workflows”05:54 Half a Billion Endpoints: What Most People Miss About Ivanti07:04 Bridging IT and Security When Reporting Lines Won’t Bridge14:18 Pick One: Where Autonomous Lands First Across ITSM, Endpoint, Security Ops14:34 Why Endpoint Wins, And What Patch Tuesday Always Got Wrong18:42 The Patch Apocalypse: Hours, Not Days, Not Weeks20:55 The System of Record That Makes Three C-Levels Happy21:46 The CIO and CISO Visibility Problem: You Can’t Patch What You Can’t See24:52 Real Customer POC: 80% of Devices Missing Significant Patches26:10 Why Some Airlines Can’t Fly Without Ivanti Software27:12 Every Board Asks: What Is Our AI Story30:52 AI Native Thinking vs AI Powered Thinking34:18 Pricing Autonomous IT: Relative Value Beats Seats38:53 Why Lovable’s Credit Model Found Power Users42:57 What Happens to the GSI Managed Services Revenue Stream46:28 The Horizon: What Excites a First-Time CEO Right NowFollow Dennis Kozak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kozakdennis/Follow Chirag Khanijau: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chirag-khanijauLinks:Ivanti: https://www.ivanti.comFlywheelr: https://www.flywheelr.comBrandStori: https://brandstori.aiCXO Spotlight: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cxospotlightListen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4xVy5IPCvf68BrGaALfUMZ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cxo-spotlight-growth-influence-leadership-in b2b/id1792963542#AutonomousIT #ITOperations #Ivanti #EndpointManagement #PatchManagement #ITSM #CIO#CISO #EnterpriseSecurity #AgenticAI #PatchApocalypse #ITServices #ManagedServices#FortuneFiveHundred #EnterpriseSoftware

Ravi Soin, Chief Information Security Officer at Smartsheet, explains why 7 out of 10 workers use AI tools their company can’t see, why governance is now part of the profit rather than just the loss column, and how he answers product teams who want to ship AI agents to Fortune 500 customers in three weeks.Ravi spent 15 years building products and securing them across Sun Microsys-tems, Real Networks, and Microsoft (Education, Windows Office, Bing), before becoming both CIO and CISO at a healthcare software company in a regulated industry for 15 years. He joined Smartsheet, the work execution platform 85% of the Fortune 500 runs operations on, after Blackstone and Vista paid $8.4 billion to take it private. He is now building the AI governance layer for how some of the largest enterprises in the world actually run their work, where the data being protected is not credit card numbers but the project plans, resource decisions, and strategic timelines that define how a company operates. Why the Smartsheet 2026 research found 7 out of 10 workers use AI tools their company can’t track, while only 1 in 4 companies have governance in place How a CIO+CISO mindset rewires the board conversation: governance as part of the profit equation, not just the cost of preventing loss What changes when private equity owns the company, including a 24x7 follow-the-sun SOC across India, Bulgaria, and the US The exact answer Ravi gives a product team that wants to ship AI agents toFortune 500 customers in three weeks (NIST 800-53 controls, security gates at code check-in, defense in depth) Why responsible AI on Smartsheet starts with one rule: AI agents do nothing a human couldn’t do, and every action is logged in real time Why the basics still beat 90% of attacks, even as time to exploit collapses from years to months to days to hours

Vicky Bindra, CEO of Trulioo, explains why the total volume of agentic com-merce transactions today is in the thousands not the millions, why the biggest blocker is a missing shared responsibility model, and what every CIO should know before their AI agents start placing orders with vendors.Vicky is one of the most uniquely qualified people to answer these questions.He spent 25 years building the rails that move money around the world at Visa, Mastercard, FIS, and Nuvei. He now runs the identity verification company that spans 195 countries, 14,000 ID documents, and 700 million business entities, deciding whether AI agents get to use those pipes. He is defining Know Your Agent as a new compliance category alongside KYC and KYB.KEY INSIGHTS: Why the move from click to buy to code to buy actually adds friction at thestart before it gets frictionless, and what that means for merchants, issuers, and CIOs deploying agents right now. The missing shared responsibility model for agentic commerce, and why merchants are quietly refusing to adopt until Visa, Mastercard, and Amex publish the rules for liability shift. Know Your Agent (KYA) as a new compliance category: who developed theagent, what the code can and cannot do, and how to bind an authorized agent to a specific customer. The CIO playbook for B2B agentic commerce: run human in the loop andagent transactions in parallel for a month, validate the construct, then identify where the real risks actually are. Why B2B agentic commerce is the bigger prize than consumer, because payment does not move with the transaction and the fraud surface collapses to two questions: quantity and delivery. The real scale of agentic commerce today: total transactions in the thousands, biggest single purchase in the small hundreds of dollars. What the hype cycle is getting wrong.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 Teaser02:20 Intro02:34 Main Episode03:22 Why an identity company was the bigger bet after 25 years in payments05:01 From click to buy to code to buy, and why the early friction is the point07:43 What breaks at Trulioo when the entity on the other side is no longer a person09:26 The fundamental difference between B2B and consumer agentic commerce11:35 Step by step, what happens when an AI agent buys something on your behalf15:26 Fragmented risk systems and why velocity without visibility is a liability16:11 If you let bad people in the door, it is very hard to get them out17:46 Know Your Agent (KYA) as a third compliance category alongside KYC and KYB21:13 The data layer, verifying both the human and the agent, and how to match them23:06 The industry liability shift merchants are quietly waiting for24:02 Agentic commerce needs a shared responsibility model, same as cloud did25:30 The B2B CIO playbook, vendor purchases, and what can blow up in your face28:24 High value goods and shortage industries as the riskiest B2B agentic surface29:21 Why B2B validation must run in parallel, unlike consumer29:44 Visibility, verification, and human in the loop, the three part B2B synthesis31:21 The real scale of agentic commerce today, transactions in the thousands32:03 Why B2B will be the bigger prize, and an optimistic read on consumer33:56 The merchant’s dilemma and what they can do tomorrow morning36:55 What a 25 year old entering fintech or AI should be learning right now40:00 The next couple of years, the optimist’s read on where this is headedFollow Vicky Bindra: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickybindraFollow Chirag Khanijau: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chirag-khanijauLinks: Trulioo: https://www.trulioo.com/Flywheelr: https://www.flywheelr.comBrandStori: https://brandstori.aiCXO Spotlight: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cxospotlightListen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4xVy5IPCvf68BrGaALfUMZListen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cxo-spotlight-growth-influence-leadership-in-b2b/id1792963542

Jesper Borg-Alsson, Chief Security Officer for Northern Europe at Palo Alto Networks, explains why your current security strategy is built for threats that no longer exist. With 20+ years managing security at scale from NATO toNotPetya incident response to advising Fortune 500 CISOs, Jesper reveals the gap between resilience (the floor) and anti-fragility (the framework that wins). He shows why organizations need to embrace disruption rather than just survive it, and what makes one vendor chosen over another when every competitor claims identical features: the ability to turn threat landscape volatility into your competitive advantage.Jesper's pattern: when complexity explodes, he builds frameworks that separate signal from noise and connect security directly to business outcomes. At Palo Alto, he works across Northern Europe advising CISOs on the specific shifts required for AI-era threat landscapes where access-to-impact now happens in under 60 seconds.Key Insights:■■ Resilience is the floor, not the ceiling. You need controls before, during, and after incidents. But mature compliance frameworks fail when process dependencies aren't mapped to digital systems. Perfect technology can coexist with fragile operations.■■ AI accelerates both attackers and defenders exponentially. Threat actors use AI to optimize attack velocity and evasion. Your security operations team cannot respond at sub-60-second attack speeds without new architecture,tooling, and decision frameworks.■■ The Imagine-Invest-Improve framework turns anti-fragility from theory into practice. Imagine phase stresses assumptions with tabletop exercises. Invest phase splits budget 80-20 for core resilience and high-risk innovation.Improve phase harvests every failure as learning.■■ Data recovery after ransomware breaks AI models silently. Restoring encrypted datasets without understanding AI training data dependencies reintroduces bias and degrades performance over time. Most organizations have zero process for this.■■ Three strategic investment areas now dominating: observability and visibility into what's running inside AI systems, integration security as AI agents multiply and create new attack surfaces, and data security through purpose-led data segmentation at creation point.Follow Chirag Khanijau: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chirag-khanijauLinks:Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.comFlywheelr: https://www.flywheelr.comBrandStori: https://brandstori.aiCXO Spotlight: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/cxospotlightListen on S #AISecurityFramework #NotPetya #DataSecurity #IntegrationSecurity#VulnerabilityManagement #IncidentResponse