The Disruptive Advantage of AI with Vistra Corp. CISO and VP of Cybersecurity Paul Reyes

Enterprise Software Defenders

On the 5th episode of Enterprise Software Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Paul Reyes, CISO and VP of cybersecurity at Vistra Corp. Vistra is a Fortune 500 company with over 5000 employees and 13.7 billion dollars in annual revenue, they are the largest competitive electricity generator in the United States. In this conversation, Paul shares his perspective on tangible ways organizations can leverage AI, the disruptive advantage of adopting AI, and the evolving cyberthreat landscape fueled by automated attacks.
Quick hits from Paul:
On the evolving cybersecurity landscape: “Clearly, what's at our fingertips right now is the rise of AI. I think there's been AI machine learning for quite some time, but the fact is that there is the Generative type of AI where it's also starting to think faster than we can. That is going to be a huge impact where you start seeing threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts to businesses a lot faster and a lot more thoughtful than we've ever seen before.”
On the advantages of AI at enterprise scale: “We have an awesome team that looks at all of our fleet and uses machine learning in our own internal AI that drives how we predict the forecast of when we need to do maintenance appropriately so that we don't waste money. There are those companies looking at what tomorrow can bring and how we innovate ourselves with this new capability. I think AI just can constantly increase that ability for companies that know how to leverage it appropriately.”
On utilizing AI tools in cybersecurity: “We always want somebody that's doing 24/7 monitoring. You want to be alerted. Sometimes you're outsourcing that service to external folks because you don't have enough people or jobs that they can stay in to be able to fulfill that. When you start looking at the various companies that are trying to augment that and leverage AI to do these common checks and balances and services, I totally agree that is a good way to leverage that [AI] and then bring that learning and knowledge base internally to your company so that you can then modify that output to search on what's specific to your business. Those are really good areas to focus on.”
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Enterprise Software Defenders is a show where top security executives share how moves to the cloud have created an evolved threat landscape that requires new tools to protect against cybercrime. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at www.enterprisesoftware.blog
Enterprise Software Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.