Guest:

• Arvin Bansal, CISO, C&S Wholesale Grocers

Topics:

• Most people do not associate grocery wholesale and retail with cutting edge technology and threat models. Can you produce the receipts for why this isn't a story of dry goods but rather a very meaty topic with beefy adversaries?
• How are you as the CISO enabling C&S's journey into AI and LLM driven work? Securing AI is a bit harder than securing classic analytics tools, right?
• In addition to securely rolling out AI, how is your defense team using AI to secure C&S? Are you into the era of agentic triage and response? What metrics for AI is your D&R lead surfacing up to you?
• You have AI in the business process that - if failed - will leave people hungry. How do you approach AI resilience?
• How do you approach resilience in general? Is cloud part of your resilience strategy?
• You worked at Citigroup for a long time. What's it like having grocery margin budgets for security instead? How does your thinking change? Does this shift your build/buy/outsource for security?
• If your IoT stack falls over, you've got literal ice cream melting in a warehouse. How do you balance your investments in cyber risk with physical operational risk? Should I be scared of forklifts?

Resources:

• EP275 Google Cloud Next 2026: The AI Earthquake, "SOC-home" Syndrome, and the Ragged Edge of Reality
• EP247 The Evolving CISO: From Security Cop to Cloud & AI Champion
• EP208 The Modern CISO: Balancing Risk, Innovation, and Business Strategy (And Where is Cloud?)
• EP212 Securing the Cloud at Scale: Modern Bank CISO on Metrics, Challenges, and SecOps

Episode co-host:

• Marina Kaganovich, Enterprise Trust Lead, Office of the CISO, Google Cloud

Guest:

• James Sherer, Partner at BakerHostetler

Topics

• Is AI just an emerging technology or something bigger, deeper and different? Is this another emerging technology or a fundamental shift?
• How to effectively govern something that is rapidly changing at unprecedented velocity? We navigated the governance of the Internet and SaaS. What makes AI governance fundamentally different from the "Classic IT" or Data Governance models of the past?
• As we move toward Agentic AI, the line between tool and teammate blurs. Should we be governing AI agents through the lens of Technical Controls or Human Resources and behavioral contracts?
• What if we hand even more responsibility to AI? Where are the tipping points as we shift from assistance to autonomy?
• How to avoid unintended, negative consequences when setting policy, contrasting risk-based vs. rights-based regulation and regulatory expectations
• Give us some practical takeaways for a defensible AI program - if an organization had to defend its AI program to a regulator or a judge tomorrow?

Related episodes:

• Video version
• EP235 The Autonomous Frontier: Governing AI Agents from Code to Courtroom
• EP161 Cloud Compliance: A Lawyer - Turned Technologist! - Perspective on Navigating the Cloud
• EP237 Making Security Personal at the Speed and Scale of TikTok

Guests:

• No guests

Topics:

• So what have we seen at Google Cloud Next 2026?
• Any closing loops for our 2023-2025 Cloud Next observations?
• We are seeing that AI security is not an island ... what does that tell us about the difference between cloud and AI adoption?
• What does "ragged edge of AI adoption" mean for security?
• Why do people want agents in their SOC? Do they know what gets better?
• What are the most notable and fun announcements?
• With patching speed, are we looking at something which can be overcome by engineering and courage? Or are we looking at something that is truly an impossibility?

Resources:

• Video version
• EP221 Special - Semi-Live from Google Cloud Next 2025: AI, Agents, Security ... Cloud?
• Next '26: Redefining security for the AI era with Google Cloud and Wiz
• Breaking the Patch Sound Barrier: Your Vulnerability Remediation Will Not Keep Up With AI Exploit Speed. So?
• EP169 Google Cloud Next 2024 Recap: Is Cloud an Island, So Much AI, Bots in SecOps
• Defending Your Enterprise When AI Models Can Find Vulnerabilities Faster Than Ever
• EP137 Next 2023 Special: Conference Recap - AI, Cloud, Security, Magical Hallway Conversations
• 260 things we announced at Google Cloud Next '26 – a recap