From Butter to Bots: How Land O’Lakes is Innovating Cybersecurity Through AI with CISO Tony Taylor

On the 21st episode of Enterprise AI Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Tony Taylor, Chief Information Security Officer at Land O'Lakes. Land O'Lakes is an American member-owned agricultural cooperative. The co-op has 9,000 employees who process and distribute products for about 300,000 agricultural producers. Land O Lakes handles 12 billion pounds of milk annually and is one of the largest producers of butter and cheese in the United States. In this conversation, Tony shares his thoughts on AI transforming the cyber threat landscape, the paradox of AI empowering defenders while enabling attackers, and strategies for cyber defense in an AI-driven world.

Quick hits from Tony:

On the oversaturation of AI as a marketing term: “You can’t talk to a vendor today where they don’t talk about their AI. Everybody’s got an AI engine. For me as a consumer of that technology, I go, well, show me how that AI works.”

On how AI can help address the talent shortage in cybersecurity: “We need to be able to bring in less mature or less experienced people and let them build that experience because the workforce isn’t there. I can’t go hire senior engineers all over the place because they’re not available.”

On AI elevating the nature of work in cybersecurity: “AI will reduce workload, and I think it’s going to reduce the workload that nobody wants to do anyway...It’s going to allow people to work at a higher level.”

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Enterprise AI 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 https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise AI Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.