Cybersecurity and AI: Bridging the Gap for Executives with Sol Rashidi | RSAC Conference 2025

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Text on TV's live coverage of RSAC from San Francisco Moscone West. We are in Broadcast Alley.

This is our 10th year covering RSAC. And this is where the best of the best experts in cybersecurity and AI are this week. We appreciate you tuning in.

I'm very excited for this next conversation. Sol Rashidi is here. She's the CEO and founder of Executive ai and you do so many things.

Sol great to have you on text. Join to be Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me.

I appreciate, I'm gonna brow on you a bit because I, I LinkedIn stalked you. Okay. You have 10 patents.

I do. Working on the 11th one right now. You're a bestselling author.

You're a top 50 women in tech. I love that. I get goosebumps and this is awesome.

Forbes AI Maverick of the 21st century. You're literally a maverick. I've been lucky.

I've been lucky far from it. I think with the pace of change and how everything's going from like we're all just barely keeping up. I know.

Um, but I was fortunate enough to get a, a few labels and titles along the way. Well that's fantastic. Talk to me a little bit about executive ai.

You are the founder, you're the managing director and this is a consulting practice. So it was interesting 'cause it happened completely by accident. I've always been a C-Suite, a part of really amazing Fortune 100 companies.

Um, like some of the largest firms that you've ever even heard of. Like I've always represented 'em as the chief data officer, chief data and analytics officer. I was the enterprise's first chief AI officer appointed back in 2016.

Okay. So I've always served these companies and I've always been brought in to build the capabilities, scale the capabilities. And so that's kind of where a lot of my practitioner experience came from.

And then I left Enterprise and I discovered that, you know, I helped IBM launch Watson back in 2011. Wow. And so from like 11 to 2015, my job was to fly around the world, work with these enterprises, help them establish their AI strategy.

Yeah. Their use cases and help them deploy. No different than how everyone started in 2023.

So I'm just watching the world kind of go. I'm like, yeah, we did this and we made that mistake and we did this and we made that mistake. But no one's calling out their mistakes, no one's calling out the lessons learned and they're so valuable.

I always say you learn from the mistakes. Absolutely. And so yeah, fail forward.

Fail fast. Yes. But like you learn.

So why should people have to go through and repeat what a slew of us, quite frankly went through nearly more than a decade ago? Yeah. So executive AI was created because I think there's a lot of C-suite executives.

I think there's a lot of leaders. I think there's a lot of companies that are learning and earning, meaning they're learning on the fly, but they don't necessarily understand what the bottlenecks are. Mm-hmm.

And I say in the world of ai, you've got data infrastructure and talent. Infrastructure is all the tech stacks, the tools like we've, it's not about GPUs and CPUs and workloads. Like we've solved that.

Data security is a major hurdle right now. Absolutely. And then talent preparation, because the way we're going to market with artificial intelligence, and I saw this back in 2012 and 13, it's, we're gonna do AI to increase productivity and capacity, which by default means we can run leaner.

And that is never the case. So the goal isn't to increase capacity so you can displace employees. Mm-hmm.

The entire intention is how do you give them time to reflect and realign on the bigger business problems. So it was supposed to be kind of a side hustle so that I could actually help other organizations go through workforce preparation and data security that then turned into kind of a thing of its own. I love that.

Sometimes serendipity, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I love your mission. I identify this with this as a market. I was telling you before we went live your mission about bridging the gap between the technical folks, the non-technical worlds helping pivot from this massive AI hype that we're still kind of in.

Yeah. But now it's time to talk about AI results. Share a little bit more about your mission.

Why is that so important to you? It's interesting 'cause for those of us that are in this space, like we are knee deep into it. Yeah.

And you hear about all the amazing startups and what they're doing and you hear about all the tech companies that we're doing. But we're missing the point because there's an entire ecosystem around us. Like most of the, if not all of the Fortune five hundreds.

They're not tech native. No. They use technologies as an enabler, but they're not tech native.

Right. So everyone is constantly in defense versus in offense. Everyone is reacting versus responding.

Yes. And they're just trying to catch up. Yes.

And so I think that's where the bridge really exists is we are in this space and we kind of understand it and we kind of geek out on our own things. But quite frankly, it doesn't matter what amazing tools and tech we build unless there's true adoption. Yeah.

Nothing we do is ever gonna scale. And the adopters happen to be the non-tech native, the non digitally native individuals. So I always like to say that I'm just a glorified translator.

And oddly enough, my first career, my first job outta school, um, I used to be a professional rugby player and then I was like, okay, time to grow up. Wow. I need to get like paid for a living so I'm not sleeping on futons and ramen noodles.

And so I became a data engineer and six months in my, my boss came to me and was like, oh my God, I'm getting fired. I thought I was getting fired. Because he said, so you're never allowed to touch a lick of production code ever again.

You could hack your way through things, but you cannot write production ready code. He said, but for some reason you like the business, you get along with the business and you know how to build relationships. So your job is to talk to them, figure it out what it is that they need, translate it to us.

'cause you know our world, we're gonna build it and then you're gonna go back to them. Because what was happening was is the business would say they would need one thing, they would build it only to find out that's not what they meant. Right.

So I thought, I was like, oh, well I'm not getting fired, but I'm totally getting demoted. But it turned out that playing this translator between the business side and the technical side turned out to be a really, really critical asset. Because most of my positions, it's not 'cause I'm the smartest person in the room.

It's 'cause I'm the only one that understands both sides of the house. You are the bridge and I can find the common ground. So the bridge, you are the bridge.

What is that like culturally to, because you, when we talk about like dev stack ops and the developers and security and there's a lot of commonalities that they have, but they struggle to collaborate. How do you see the tactical folks collaborating and cohabitating with the non-technical folks? What some of the magic that you've seen happen and what's essential for that cohabitation?

Yeah. I would say what's essential for that cohabitation is if our technical folks who have tremendous IQ also put just as much emphasis on their eq. Yeah.

Their BQ and their sq. You know, I would say the first big faux pa and mistake I made in my first C-suite role was I leaned and over leaned into my iq. Well they clearly put me in this position 'cause they thought I was smart enough to have the C-suite position.

Right. But I learned that my IQ actually wasn't gonna help me evangelize or scale or help build critical mass in the things that we were building. It was my eq, my ability to read the room and the groups and the teams to understand what they were afraid of or why they were pushing back and resisting so much.

Or my bq the ability to translate our terms and terminologies and taxonomies, um, and lexicon of language into their language, which we don't do in our world very, very well. And then the SQ at the end of the day, people still believe into people. They still buy from people.

Right. And so my writing joke was at one of my employers, I went to more happy hours than I could even care for. But it built the trust.

Yes. So I would have one-on-ones with these executives, these presidents and CEOs and saying, listen, I don't get it. I don't understand it, but you do and I trust you.

So I'm gonna give you a few of my resources. Go pilot this. And then if quite frankly, if the response is well, then we will evangelize and scale it.

So it was like that's all it took. Yeah. And so what I always like to say is, you know, technology can scale efficiencies, but relationships are what scale the opportunities.

Absolutely. And that's not something we really lean in on too sometimes 'cause we just kinda like geeking out on the tools. Yeah, we do.

But you bring up such a great point that so much of this, even in the age of ai, the era of AI Yeah. Is relationship based. It still is.

And it's, which I, I like that because there are soft skills like empathy for example. You talked about eq, curiosity, the ability to bridge gaps that are so vital to every role that some of them aren't trainable. You're born with it.

Right? Yeah. I I But you can develop it.

Okay. Like if you put a conscious effort. Yeah.

Um, you know, naturally I was always hired to be a bit of a change agent. Yeah. To build capabilities that didn't exist before.

And I was in travel and entertainment. I was in music, I was in pharmaceuticals, I was in consumer products. Well consumer products, travel and entertainment and media and entertainment.

Like music industry. They're very, very creative spaces. Mm-hmm.

And so I was always like, well we're building the amazing things. You should use it. You've been asking for this.

But it never really cracked the nut. And then it was storytelling helps. Learning their language helps.

Right. But then I realized that a lot of this is just fear-based and habits. So I'll never forget this, but we went to a leadership conference in one of my, the, the CDO role that I was serving for this company.

And I was getting massive resistance even though what I thought we were building was amazing. And so they had me speak on stage and I said, listen, I'm not here to replace your intuition. Mm-hmm.

I'm not here to replace your experience and I'm not here to replace your relationships. But you have questions and you're frustrated at getting those answers. So my job is to make sure that you have those insights and those data points Right.

When you need them so that you could make those bigger business decisions. So don't view me as a threat. View me as your enabler and supporter so that you could lean in more on your relationships and experiences, but the data points that you need, you're not getting frustrated.

'cause you have to wait days if not weeks, to be able to get them. So I'm here to support you. So consider me a stool, you're here to step on me so that you could elevate your performance and your team's performance.

Yep. And I know my function, it is here to serve you. Yeah.

And it was just amazing 'cause the presidents of the divisions and the heads of like the different functional areas, they pause, everyone stopped looking at their phone or doing whatever they were and then you like, they were just kind of baffled. And then the week later, all the one-on-ones I had requested were now accepted. Nice.

I was getting the executive assistant saying, Hey, Matt wants to talk to you. Hey, that thing that you said really resonated. There's some ideas we wanted.

Then I started getting invited to the leadership calls. And so the goal isn't about threatening or displacing. Right.

It's about elevating those that create magic. That's a great word. Think that's what we technologists do.

How do you advise perspective leaders to go from that practitioner role Yeah. To leadership? Yeah.

I imagine the languages are very different. They're very different. Yes.

You know, I moderated a panel yesterday. Yeah. Which is amazing.

We had the CISO of meta, we had the CISO of open ai, we had the CISO of Anthropic. Like those are my rock stars, right? Yes.

Me too. In the eighties it was like Bon Jovi Def Lepp. But now I'm like, oh, it's, it's Matt.

I, Jason. Yeah. Um, and they were on a panel and I asked them a very question and it was interesting to see everyone's responses.

Yeah. But the one thing that they had in common was they never lost their practitioner skill, but they learn how to lead and manage because practitioners, we love geeking out. We love going deep.

We're kind of hard to manage. We're a bit an, we're kind of anarchist. Um, we love our bubble and we wanna stay in it.

Yeah. But when you learn to manage and lead, and I made so many mistakes and I have to apologize to a lot of people who reported into me earlier on, I was learning and earning at the same time. My leadership style is so different than the way it was good for you 10 years ago.

Yeah. Um, that's the biggest thing. You gotta learn how to work with people and not just the people that you manage.

Yeah. Also your peers. Yes.

Also the people above you. Like, it's kind of like if you're at the middle of this vector, you've got arrows going and all. Yes.

You've gotta be a compass of influence. Compass of of influence. And that takes a lot of energy and effort.

Yes. Yes. It's draining.

It's, but if you can do it well, you could leapfrog forward. What, what is a timeframe that you've normally seen practitioners being able to take on the education of management. Of leadership.

Yeah. This is not, I imagine an overnight process. 'cause there's behavioral changes that have to happen.

And as people change is hard. Change is very hard. It depends.

If you're in a startup, you can do it as early as your late twenties, early thirties. Yeah. Um, chief product officers, you know, chief revenue officers, head of DevOps and startups like I've met anywhere from like 26 to 34.

Yeah. But you're an enterprise. The risk profile is a lot bigger.

Absolutely. The teams are a lot larger. Yes.

The revenues that are being questioned are a lot grander. Yes. And so there's an element of not only just practitioner maturity, but personality maturity that goes into it that showcases you know, how to navigate this world.

And you're not gonna throw a tantrum if you don't get your way. What are some of the soft skills that are essential for this practitioner transformation? Yeah.

Business language. Business language. We can throw, like in the data space, we could talk about lineage and catalogs and enterprise data management and master data management.

Yep. Data security and InfoSec all day long that does zero for the business. Zero.

Mm. I don't even use my language in front of them. Okay.

You know, my, my pitch is always like, aren't you frustrated that it takes months rather than minutes to be able to get the information you need? I'll fix that. Yes.

But I'm gonna need six months. I'm gonna need X amount of dollars and I'm gonna need two people from your team because I need them to do X, Y, and Z. Mm-hmm.

And you'll solve that problem in four to five months and it'll be productionalized in six. I won't even talk about how I'm gonna do it. Okay.

And then if I get asked, then I'm like, all right, lemme break it down for you. Sure. And then I go into my language.

Yeah. Usually they glaze over again. Okay.

That's fine. We'll, I'll be your stakeholder. Here's the funding that you have approved.

Here's the headcount you have approved. Go build. What's one of your favorite stories of impact that you've made and in an, in a, in an in opportunity, like what you just described?

Ooh, that's a good one. I'm sure you have many. I do.

Okay. One of my favorite, favorite use cases for artificial intelligence is building what I call an augmented knowledge store. Yeah.

For customer support, whether you're in financial services or commercial banking. Right. There's warranties, there's offers, there's, there's so much to memorize.

Or if you're in consumer products, there's a ton of product SKUs that you have to memorize. It is nearly impossible for anyone to go through and memorize. Yeah.

If they're even documented by the way. Right. In these manuals and PDFs because new service and offerings and, and warranties, like they're constantly being offered day in and day out.

And so you're dealing with a group customer support that historically is not tech forward. Yeah. Not tech centric.

They've often been with the company 20 plus years. There's a lot of fear and resistance towards new tech. Sure.

But it also has the most, like the easiest opportunity because it takes six to seven months to onboard a customer service rep from getting to know the process, memorizing the products and services, shadowing a senior person, then actually to attending calls and being shadowed. It's a long process that opex cost is massive. Sure.

Um, so one of my favorites was one of the companies I'd worked with that I said, listen, why are we having our customer support reps me memorizing 80,000 different SKUs? Right. The focus should be on answering the question as quickly as possible.

Right. And giving assurance to the person who's calling in to complain, not on trying to recollect and going, um, um, I don't know. Um, um, let me escalate.

Um, um, hold please. Let me ask my manager. So it's the easiest and the most fun.

And you get to see the aha moments in the customer service reps of creating this augmented knowledge store where they're like, which one of my products are vegan? Which one has this ingredients gonna create an allergic reaction? And they'll get a list.

So as the person calling and asks a question, they have this copilot next to them not to be confused with Microsoft. Sure. But they have this assistant.

Yeah. They type the questions, they get the immediate answers, and then they're able to answer it and go, and by the way, I completely understand what you're going through. Let me make sure that my response is exhaustive.

Because even though this isn't a primary ingredient in our products, I want you to be aware of the other products that have it as a secondary and tertiary that's building trust. Absolutely. And brands right now, trust is the biggest currency.

Currency absolutely. So easy, so responsive. Um, and customer service reps, they don't have to understand tech, they just have to know that they don't have to memorize everyth.

They're empowered 100%. Which every brand needs to have that last question for you. Yeah.

Here we are at RSAC. The, the cybersecurity landscape changes minute by minute. Okay.

Probably second by second. What encourages you about where we are in this AI era from a cybersecurity perspective? Ooh, I pause because If truth be told, I'm a little bit worried.

Yeah. I think we're still very much in a defensive posture Yes. Versus being in offensive posture.

Yes. Agreed. I think there's still a lot that we don't know.

Yes. Um, our surface area of exposure is not doubling or quadrupling like it's beyond Moore's Law as we go from what we call artificial intelligence. But whether it's augmented intelligence or automated intelligence into autonomous agents where the agents are gonna be making the decisions.

We're not there yet. I'll be very honest. We're talking about it.

But by the time enterprise catches up, like the risk profile for that is very, very massive. Um, there's a lot of steps that go into it and folks aren't aware yet. Our surface area just gets vast.

Right. And right now, you know, earlier stats were saying that there was about 23%, if you talk about 2022 of attacks were cyber attacks, it's now, now gone up to 50%. But the stats are that by the mid 2026, most of those attacks, it's gonna increase to 75% are actually gonna be machine to machine attacks.

Mm-hmm. Not human to machine attacks and the detection levels needed for those. It's just a completely different ballgame.

So we're gonna have to rewrite the script fairly shortly. Yeah. It's challenging to, to think about how to become proactive when there's still so much defense going on, so much defense and we're all behind, like, it's impossible to keep up with the pace of change.

It, it's breakneck speed. I know. I feel like I'm under a lake with a straw, like just trying to get gas a little bit, a little bit of air.

Yes. I'm in this space. I can't even imagine what it's gotta be like if you're not.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's been so great having you on the program.

Thank you for sharing what you're doing, how you are achieving that mission, how you are the bridge between the technical, the non-technical, and really helping organizations pivot from this AI hype to AI reality. We so appreciate your insights and your time on Textron. Thank you so much.

My pleasure. Bril Rashidi. I'm Lisa Martin.

You're watching Textron TV live from the show floor of RSAC in broadcast la We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.