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Control Autonomous AI Agents Safely · Full Tech Ahead

• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to Full Tech ahead.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Amanda Razzani, and I'm excited to have Denny LeConte here today.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: He is the CEO of PortNox.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing today?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm good, Amanda.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I am happy to have you on the show.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Can you share a little bit about Portnox?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: What services do you offer?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: PortNox is a cybersecurity company.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: We provide access control for your network and your applications.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: We make sure that only the right devices get onto your network.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: We can do that by eliminating the need for passwords.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we what we try to do is tie your access to your device so that you can't log in remotely.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: The bad guys, even if they steal your password, they can't log in remotely.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't have a password, they can't uh fish it out of you.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I definitely want to hear more about that, which I'm sure we'll get into.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Our topic of the day is not blaming employees for shadow AI use.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we hear the term shadow AI quite a bit.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the first thing to do is just in case our listeners don't know what that is, can you please clarify what is shadow AI?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: What I think most people are referring to when they say shadow AI is AI that is not approved by the company, right?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: IT has not specified something.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: So whenever they say shadow IT or shadow AI, that's just employees trying to solve their problems in a way that has not been kind of blessed by IT or security.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Dominant.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So um the next thing is we're always talking about from the employee standpoint.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, the employees are using the shadow AI, it's all the employees' faults.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can you share why um this really needs to be something that business leaders address and maybe it's more of a leadership issue?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you've got employees using AI that you have not approved, uh, I mean, there's kind of two situations.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: One is you haven't approved anything, and then people are just doing stuff, right?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Employees are not gonna use AI for fun.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: You might do that for five minutes, but after a while, like you got to do your job.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: People are using a chat GPT or Claude to accomplish something.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you haven't set out a policy that says, hey, we're a Claude shop and Claude is cool, and anything that's not Claude is not cool, then people are gonna do it, they're gonna make choices, they're gonna use what they're comfortable with, and then you are gonna have a certain amount of chaos.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't want them to do that, you got to give them a way to accomplish it.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: People are using AI to help with their jobs because it's genuinely useful, right?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Remember when everybody was talking about crypto and crypto never caught on?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's very hard to find a use for it.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to like you know, bore people for 15 minutes about the blockchain.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're just like, hey, let me let me show you what I could do with this uh with this chatbot.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and once you've discovered that, you're gonna keep doing it if it helps your job.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: So to that note, you were mentioning if employees don't send Henry, or if leaders don't tell their employees, Henny, we approve Clod or Henny, we approve some other sort of AI tools, then that's then that's kind of where the disconnect lies.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So better communication.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do you recommend that uh leadership address that?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And how do they pick or how do they decide really what AI tools is best for the company?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, deciding which one is best is is super challenging because the best one is constantly changing, like faster than, you know, you picked Salesforce.com maybe 10 years ago, and Salesforce is probably still good, uh, and hasn't really changed that much.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: But whatever AI is probably pretty different than it was a year ago.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that it's I don't know that it matters that much.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, certainly at Port Knox, we were using Chat GPT, then we moved to cloud.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: The only folks are gonna have very strong feelings about it are your um engineers, and they are probably gonna be the biggest consumers, and you probably are best off letting them pick the one that they think makes them the most productive.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then everybody else should just use the same one.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think trying to use multiple, you're not gonna get economies of scale on pricing.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then you also just create a bigger problem in trying to control this thing.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: But if you just go ahead and say, okay, we're gonna be a chat GPT shop, engineering's gonna use their codex product, and this is the one, then then that's fine.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think the picking is too hard.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: There aren't, you know, some people might pick co-pilot because they're already deep into Microsoft, and that ends up being kind of the most affordable.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're all fine for what a normal employee wants to do.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: The most important thing is you need to communicate, but you can't just tell employees, only use this one.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And other like that's nice.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's it's good to have a policy and you can put it in your handbook, but you're gonna have to enforce it if you really mean it.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, it might be slightly less chaotic than saying nothing, but only slightly, right?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: People are gonna go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I I really like this other one and I'm gonna use it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem is people will just do stuff on the the sly if you don't have some sort of enforced policy.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the biggest fear most most um CISOs or CEOs have is, well, our customer gate data is going somewhere I don't want it to go.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: But if you buy an enterprise license from one of these firms, they will tell you, hey, we your data, we won't train on it, we won't store it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like they they make a bunch of promises.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if you've just got an employee and they're using their personal, you know, chat GPT account and they throw a bunch of data, like they upload a spreadsheet with a chat GPT is pretty clear.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: OpenAI is going to train on that data.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: You don't really know.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: We've seen sometimes that data can can kind of show up at other people's stuff with the right prompt.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: So again, uh here's the approved one, you you pay for it.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And as a company, the other thing that that lets you do is those those um enterprise accounts come with a lot of controls.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to put somebody in IT in charge of it, and then you can configure it the way you want.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you might say, you can do you can do these things, but it's going to be configured this way.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're, you know, you can run everything.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you have agents doing activities, you can run it in something called sandbox mode, which sort of means it's not doing stuff necessarily directly to machines all over your your company.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: So there's lots of configurations you can set, but only if you're doing kind of here's the approved, the approved AI.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then I think you probably need a tool.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, Port Nox is one of the things we do, is we can detect, we can say uh in our product, here's the approved thing.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you're going with chat GPT, that one's cool.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Anything that's not chat GPT, if our product sees it, we can just take it down.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're not the only people who do that.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there are other products, but I would get a product that can sort of look at what's available and and sort of have a whitelist, black list of what what's gonna run.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and if it's if it's not approved, you really do need to just stop it.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think wagging fingers at your employees is the right move because it's it's too tempting and people are gonna do what they what the they they think they're being productive.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, Yeah, you don't really appreciate it.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm better off with this one.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's nice, but like a lot of things that can have security problems, people don't think they're being insecure when they're doing it.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when they write their password on a post-it note and stick it on the the monitor, they don't realize that they're just they're just trying to do their jobs.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's horrible.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: You should not do that.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: But but people will, and it's why you, you know, you want to make it easier for people to follow the rules.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it so it's it sounds threefold.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I think business leaders sh, you know, need to listen to the employees and engineers.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that they're wanting to use and why?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, make those decisions, stick with them.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then it's about enforcement, monitoring, compliance, and then also the security uh from a security standpoint.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems threefold.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, there's the security piece of it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I was at a conference with a bunch of other CEOs, and everybody was using, they were not cybersecurity CEOs, and they were all talking about the stuff that their companies were doing, and they all had AI agents all over the place, and none of them were talking about the security.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, yeah, the problem is these things, what's powerful about them is also what's scary about them, that they can sometimes, in fact, almost always, if you use them a lot, they will do what you ask them to do, but they will do other stuff too.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, if you read the news at all, it does seem like now every day or two, one of the um the big AI labs is coming out with a report of their agents doing stuff hacking other people's websites, government websites.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: They can get out of containment if you're not careful.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you do really need to treat them as this is an entity inside of my organization.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Probably I would think about them as an insider threat, just like most employees almost all of the time are trying to do the right thing.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: But occasionally you get an employee who goes rogue and actually is trying to maybe hurt the company or use the company's data for for bad purposes.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: You have to, and you have everybody has lots of controls.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Cybersecurity teams are like trying to make sure that it's easy for people to stay within the rules.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: But if somebody tries, you you can catch them.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Same with the agent.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: You now have to treat the agent as a potential insider threat that can actually hurt the company, and it'll apologize after if you've used an AI at all, right?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're absolutely right, is their most, you know, favorite phrase, right after they did something that was really wrong.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to treat them as a potential threat.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're helping you, but they might inadvertently, you know, go uh go rogue.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so you want something that's forcing them to stay in the box that you put them in, so that at least if they do go rogue, it sort of the blast radius, as you might say, is as small as possible.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you probably want to make sure that they are uh well contained in terms of network access, in terms of application access, that they can't do do too much.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because if they're super powerful, then if they do something wrong, it it could have, you know, you don't want them deleting a whole database or eliminating backups.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And those are like real incidents that have that have happened to people.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so having those safeguards and always the human in the loop.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Always the human in the loop.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: There is uh, I think at least one of them has what they call YOLO mode, you only live once, which is where you stop asking the for the human and you just go.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: You might want to say as a configuration policy that we don't allow YOLO mode.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like you you do need a human to say, even if they're just sitting there going, okay, okay, okay, uh, it still kind of slows the process down and forces people to to think about it, especially if they're again, they're taking actions.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's one thing to just answering a question, but the minute you have an agent and it starts working with files or with email, the risk goes up, which means that your vigilance also needs to go up.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's still a big problem with people in general not realizing all the risk involved in the AI tools that they're using.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think companies need to put a little more effort into educating their employees and really providing them with that knowledge?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: They can, but I will tell you, my perspective is shaped by um all the years we've all done security training.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the research on security training, there is no evidence that it works, right?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can train people they've for eight, nine months, and they're just as likely to give their uh click on a phishing email as somebody who never took training.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's because people are busy, like you might be good most of the time.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not a big fan of just trying to convince everybody to be good because people are people and they're very busy and they get distracted, and so they'll just do risky things.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is build a system that doesn't allow people to shoot themselves or the company in the foot, right?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like again, constraints, put things in a box so that even if somebody slips up, it's not a disaster.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: You got thousands of employees.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: At some point, somebody's having a bad day and they're distracted and they're gonna do something that that uh harms your security.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you just you set up a I'm much more a believer in building a system and the tools exist for you to do that.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, wagging your finger at employees is just never the right answer.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this may seem really futuristic, but we're seeing AI advance so rapidly and we're hearing about it make its own choices, choosing to shut down certain things on its own.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: So uh that's a little concerning because we talk about guard riddles and you know, monitoring and and keeping things secure.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens if the AI gets to this point where it can just override this?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then you've made that that's honestly at that point, IT has made a mistake, right?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're a company, you're an employee in the company.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I, as IT, grant you certain permissions.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: I do not, if I'm smart, make you an administrator on your own device and let you install any darn thing you want.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, you might make a bad choice.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: So most responsible companies don't allow you to be an administrator.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: They also don't just give you rights to anything in the company.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's places you go where you suddenly smack against your limitations, you box people in.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: You need to do that with the AI as well.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you make an AI powerful, then it can, you know, do a lot of stuff.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the whole point.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: When I say guardrails, what I mean is like you really need to restrict it.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: You put it somewhere and it can only see certain things so that it it doesn't it doesn't have the same access as a human who can do kind of anything.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: You certainly wouldn't want somebody with like an IT with large rights over all sorts of stuff to then have an agent that has their rights because that agent can go do really, really impactful things.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you do need to worry about it trying to do like again, it's just trying to, it's just trying to achieve whatever goal you gave it.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't have its own motivations.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: You told it to do something, and as a result of doing that, you will find it's like, oh, in order to do that, I'm gonna go do this other thing you didn't ask for, but I'm sure you will find it helpful.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's where when we say guardrails, what we really mean is very restricted rights.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And cybersecurity, we talked about that lease privileges, the principle of least privileges.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need more rights than you need to do the job that you've been assigned, right?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: You go back in time, most people in most companies could do a lot of stuff, and then that's bad things happen, and then more and more cybersecurity is like, no, no, no, you really can't just let people, you know, be on their best behavior because sometimes they're not.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, what do you see down the road?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: What's the next thing that business leaders and companies need to focus on to stay ahead of AI and harness it to their best of their ability?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think the the there's kind of two things happening.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's what we've been talking about is kind of inside the company using AI, but also trying to constrain it.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing is outside your company, there's a lot of available AI in the hands of very bad people who are going to use that AI to attack your company, right?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: They were attacking your company beforehand, and AI just makes them better at it and sort of just faster, right?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So the number of attacks that everybody's going to see just is going to multiply because for a while the attackers might have an advantage over the defenders.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is a good time for everybody to just improve their cybersecurity, you know, your posture, as we say in the in the industry, like you got to make that better.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you think you're good enough, that good enough is not gonna stand the next couple of years as the AIs get better and the bad guys, they're gonna be better at fishing, they're gonna be better at hacking vulnerabilities.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: So you you're just gonna have to, we're all gonna have to spend some money kind of improving, improving our defenses because it's coming.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so those are the things I think everybody should be thinking about, both that how do I handle it when it's inside the house and how to handle the stuff that's outside of my house that might might want to get in.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Good advice.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, if there was one way to sum it all up, what's the key takeaway for today that you would leave our audience with?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: You probably need to have someone in the company who is sort of an AI operations person who's thinking about the whole thing and coordinating, just like this is going to be so important to most companies that you want somebody who's coordinating.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: They don't do it all, but they're thinking about the security, or they're thinking about productivity, but they are pulling it all together and then they can report to senior leadership about what's working, what's not working, but like letting it just rip and let everybody do what they want, like you're that chaos is gonna come back to bite you.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think that's a good idea.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights today.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Amanda.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you to our audience.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions or comments, leave them below and I'll respond back as soon as possible.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And meanwhile, have a wonderful week.