AI Where It Matters, Not AI Everywhere — with Zeina Zakhour, Global CTO Cybersecurity at Eviden (Atos) Recorded live at CISO Day, this episode brings Menno van der Horst and co-host Quint Ketting together with Zeina Zakhour, Global CTO for Cybersecurity at Eviden (Atos), for a fast-moving conversation on where cyber is heading and what it really takes to keep up. We open with a sobering reality: many of today's threats are exposing weaknesses that have existed for decades. The panic isn't warranted — but action is. Zeina makes the case that the issue is rarely a lack of technology depth, but a lack of security depth: the basic hygiene and foundational controls that too many organisations still treat as something for "next year." Spoiler — next year is no longer an option. From there we get into the heart of it: — Adaptive, systemic resilience. Security can't be an afterthought bolted on once innovation ships. It has to sit at the core. We dig into why maturity built once and then left alone decays faster than most leaders expect. — Risk first, always. You don't secure a water utility the way you secure a hospital, a retailer or a bank. Every organisation has its own ecosystem and purpose — and that's where Eviden's Prepare, Respond, Adapt approach starts: understanding who you are, then keeping your risk picture live rather than buried in a spreadsheet updated once a year. — AI, agents and the new attack surface. Not "AI everywhere" — AI where the risk, the data and the friction justify it. We talk identity as the number one attack vector, the danger of human-led processes throttling machine-speed tooling, prompt and meta-prompt injection, agent goal drift, kill switches, and what "identity" even means for an autonomous agent that has intent, makes decisions and calls tools. — Chained vulnerabilities. Why "we'll only fix the high-severity CVEs" is the wrong instinct — low-severity issues can be chained into something genuinely exploitable, fast. — Sovereignty vs autonomy. A crucial distinction too many conflate. We get into data residency, technological sovereignty, the model/middleware/GPU reality of "sovereign AI" today, post-quantum, and why Europe can only answer these questions together rather than country by country. We close where good security conversations always seem to land: sharing more, building a bubble of trust, backing European innovation and startups, and staying agile enough to adapt as the ground keeps shifting. Zeina's recommendations: 📑 Atos Cyber Shield blog and Threat Research Center — regular, genuinely interesting analysis on new campaigns and malware variants. 📖 The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom — nothing to do with cyber, everything to do with being worth your time. 🎧 Listen now, and let us know your take in the comments. #SecurityCafe #Cybersecurity #CISO #AISecurity #Resilience #DigitalSovereignty
