The Trust Crisis: How Cybersecurity Became Every Leader’s Job with Karen Kaukol, CMO of Entrust

Toni:

Hello, hello, welcome back to Leading Women in Tech. Today, I’m diving into a conversation that every single one of you, regardless of your role, needs to hear. Because whether you’re in engineering, product, marketing, HR, ops, you are already leading inside a world where AI and cybersecurity are no longer technical issues, they’re leadership issues. And today’s guest is one of the best people you could possibly learn from in this space. Karen Kaukol is the Chief Marketing Officer at Entrust a global leader in security, identity and trust. She has a career that spans payments, fintech, high tech, brand leadership at companies like First Data and Western Union. She brings a combination of deep cyber security insight. is such a good communicator of making it understandable to every person, but alongside world-class marketing and communication, as well as being a kick-ass executive. She’s here today to share with you what it looks like to be at the intersection of trust, technology, business growth, and translate complex risks, AI disruption, and cybersecurity challenges that come about because of AI into actionable leadership insight. I wanted to hear on this show because we are entering this new era where trust isn’t a competitive advantage. And this is why every single one of you need to be paying attention. Because trust has changed. The threat landscape has changed.

The expectations that we have as individuals, as leaders, as boards have changed. The way AI is being deployed by your team, your tools, your customers, and yes, malicious actors has changed. Ignoring this shift is not an option, not anymore. So in today’s conversation, and I are digging into what trust means in the AI era. Why you can no longer just rely on firewalls and passwords.

We talk about the new risks and opportunities of AI agents acting inside your systems and why every leader, every one of you needs to be cyber literate. We’re talking about how boards are now thinking about cybersecurity risk and you need to know that even if you’re not a CISO. And why high performers just like you must be adopting AI to stay relevant. And of course she brings her own candid refreshing take on leadership, her career journey. This woman is an inspiration.

It’s all about staying human in an increasingly automated world. You’re going to work away from today’s episode with a new perspective on your role as a leader. And I hope a renewed sense of responsibility, but also empowerment for what you can change. Because as Karen puts it so clearly, security isn’t just a protection layer, it’s a growth enabler. So whatever your level, whether you’re a VP, a seasoned executive, or someone simply wanted to stay ahead of the curve, this conversation is going to help you.

So whether you’re an aspiring VP, a new director, or that seasoned executive with a board seat, or you simply just want to stay ahead of the curve, this conversation is going to change how you think about AI, trust, and leadership. Let’s dive on in.

Welcome to the show, Karen. Thank you for joining us today.

Karen:

Oh, thank you, Toni. I’m really happy to be here. I’ve been looking forward to it.

Toni:

likewise. Well, start off by introducing yourself. Tell us about yourself, who you are, what you do, and how you came to be a CMO at Entrust today.

Karen:

Sure, So I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Entrust. I have responsibility for basically the full range of marketing duties for the company. So everything from strategy, brand, product marketing, demand gen, all the digital stuff, partner marketing, comms and the like. It’s a really rich portfolio of assignments in a very hot space. Cybersecurity is never dull. It’s getting more relevant from day to day. And so I just, feel really lucky to be in the position I’m in and have a great team and really a great leadership team that is helping the business grow to the next level.

Toni:

Yeah, I’d love to learn a little bit about your journey. Like, how did you get to the point where you’re in charge of all of that? Can you tell us what inspired you to get to this point in your career?

Karen:

gosh, you know, it’s funny you look back and you realize sometimes you don’t even know, like I didn’t have a plan starting out, but I began my career in public relations for the U.S. Olympic Committee. And I think the thing that I now realize in hindsight, I never really had a plan for being a CMO, but I have always had a real towering strength in communication and telling stories and simplifying messaging. And so even that first job, which was completely unrelated to cybersecurity, but it got me into a place where I was explaining sports that were kind of obscure to journalists that didn’t know much about them, but they loved the Olympics and wanted to talk about it. And from there, I just sort of moved through it. know, as life took hold, had kids moved into more of a corporate setting.

It started out at Western Union Payments, so money transfer and remittances all over the world. Super exciting and compelling business that you really felt like you were helping people to connect back with their family and uplift people in situations where they really depended on those remittances to live. It had a range of roles there, product marketing, brand marketing.

Ran a business unit, then I went into a broader payments role with a company called First Data. Today it’s known as BISERF, but got a feel for cybersecurity, analytics, serving merchants as well as the issuers and the whole payments ecosystem. That got me here. I came in originally as a general manager of the instant financial issuance business for Entrust, but I think about a year in the CEO asked me to step into the CMO role.

They were wanting to take it to the next level, struggling to break down complex technology into stories and benefits that people could understand. And they also really wanted to make their brand mean something. And all of that stuff just lights me up. So here I am, nine years later, and I’m just having the time of my life.

Toni:

I mean, cyber security is definitely a topic which I think is incredibly important. It’s one of reasons I was excited to get you on the show because I don’t think any company can ignore cyber security and particularly in the age of AI, right? So let’s talk about what you currently do from that angle. Like trust is literally in the name of your company in trust. mean in this day and age and why should my listeners who work across all aspects of a tech company, what does trust look like for small and large companies in the AI era? How do you see it redefining what trust looks like today?

Karen:

Yeah, it’s such a moment to be talking about this because it’s changed so much. I I think about there was a time when it was just all about firewalls and passwords and securing the network perimeter and now there is no network perimeter. There are so many devices and now we’re moving into a world of agents acting on behalf of other humans performing jobs. so Trust has gotten to the point where it has to be baked into everything you consider about how you’re running your business. And particularly with AI coming into the scene, AI is on both sides of the equation. It’s driving accelerated levels of more sophisticated fraud, but it’s also enabling us to fight fraud in more sophisticated ways. So I think if you’re not thinking about how you build security and trust into every step of your business, every interaction internally and externally, you could really be setting yourself up for problems. It’s just so foundational now. And I think all of us who are in conversation with our board of directors, it’s all anybody’s talking about. Forever it was cybersecurity, the risk of breaches. Well, now AI is on the scene. There’s the synergy opportunities, but it’s also compounding the risk.

It is just a topic we all have to be conversant in, keep top of mind, and really be baking into our day-to-day thinking and decision-making as leaders.

Toni:

Yeah, I said I want to go to that. I have another question about AI for you in a minute, but I want to pivot onto that comment you made there about AI is both an enabler of fraud, but also enabling you to counteract fraud and fight it. So let me ask you this, as somebody who’s been in industries, the forefront of, you know, supercomputing in my case, like the whole point of supercomputing is to be the forefront of the industry. The thing I would say is really true, and especially now as a coach, is every technology can be used for good and for bad.

Is AI any different? Is it just following the same model? Obviously there’s so much more behind it, but is it any different?

Karen:

Well, I think that’s fair. I think any technology can be, and that’s been the pattern through the years, right? We have this major disruption cycle. People are kind of thrown for the loop. The world’s changing, and then you kind of settle in and figure out how to think about it, how to leverage it. For me, AI is a set of capabilities that is just creating an acceleration that we haven’t seen before. And we think about originally with AI, it’s kind of started out

We were using it more more a technology about responding and providing answers. And now it’s a technology was we get into more of the sophisticated agents. It’s doing work. It’s acting as an employee of your company and these AI agents and their

They’re acting independently with guidance. And so that’s a new level of openness and visibility across your network that you really have to think about. You’ve got to think about, we’re used to authenticating humans coming into the network. And then we were authenticating devices that might need to call into the network. But now you’ve got these agents, non-human devices.

roaming around your network doing things and a lot can be exposed if you don’t have the right business processes and rules in place.

Toni:

There is so much that I’m going to dig into that a little bit more in just a minute because I think that’s something I hadn’t even thought of and I thought I knew what I was doing with AI. Well, kind of. So I want to dig into that agents piece in just a minute and how that’s a security risk and give some advice to you guys. But before we do that I want to talk about your job as a marketer because I work with a number of CMOs or senior marketing leaders. And one thing I am hearing a lot is a pressure to use AI more. I think everybody’s hearing that, I’ve done episodes on that, the pressure to use AI. How most companies are going slower than the CEO wants them to. And I say that’s true of my company, I’m CEO of my company. My team is slower adopting AI than I would like them to be. They know that, I adore them. They’re the best team ever, but they’re a bit slower.

But a lot of people are saying to me, surely marketing has just been replaced by AI by now. What are your thoughts? You own every aspect of marketing in your company. What are your thoughts on that?

Karen:

So time we have all the same conversations and we’re getting ready to go to our board meeting next week in a couple of weeks and one of our key discussions is how we’re leveraging AI to transform not only the productivity of the business and the way we think about the various functions but also how we develop products and deliver products. Marketing in particular is one of those areas that’s viewed as a high opportunity large number of use cases. I find We are using it organically a lot and really using it for a range of tasks that are just kind of continuing to blossom. Started out maybe with, doing deep research, synthesizing reports, going to meet with a client, what can you tell me about, based on their last 10K, what are the top five things they might be thinking about from a cybersecurity perspective? Super helpful.

Now we’re using it to create content, original drafts, to provide guidance on scenario planning, to create brand videos. We’re getting ready to launch a new brand ad campaign in the first quarter. And think about it, Toni, like we used to spend half a million dollars developing videos. Yeah, and we are now have high-end creative, we’re doing through AI, that’s going to cost me a fifth of that. So not only is your time to market so much better, but the risk equation when you’re 100 grand versus 500, you can take more risk, can move with more agility, you can customize more readily. So we’re using it in a lot of ways and just really kind of feeling like

Karen:

The potential is we’re just in the early stages and we’re also finding out that the highest performers on the team and in the company are the ones doing the most queries. We were just in a session yesterday with our guy from Microsoft. said, based on your data, the people who are the highest performers here are doing twice as many queries a month through AI as the other colleague base. And their advice to us was don’t mandate it.

But get the mojo going so people see what’s possible and want to join the train. Get on the train and really start leveraging it. Because once you start to see the light bulbs go off, this is really a valuable tool for building presentations, for building content, talk track, videos, go on and on and on. And marketers are so harried with so many requests. This is a real time saver and quality, quality enabler for us.

Toni:

Do you see, because I think there’s a lot of threat response in a lot of the people I’m working with where they’re like, gosh, am I going to have a job in a few years? And I’m like, I don’t see these, especially the strategic roles, I don’t see those going away anytime soon. What is your thought? Do you think marketing is going to go away because AI is going to take over or do you think that’s the red herring?

Karen:

No. Red herring. I think that marketing, what will go away, people who don’t know how to use AI and incorporate it into their job will be at risk. And the risk is that they’ll be replaced by someone who is AI friendly and using it in a robust way. You still need the thinking and the strategy behind it and somebody guiding that work. AI can only go so far without the proper guidance parameters, prompts, etc. So you’ve got to have the strategy people. You’re going to be thinking it’s really how we evolve to think differently about the work of marketers. And maybe the work is no longer I am literally writing this cell sheet or designing this piece of creative but I can leverage tools and give it prompts to help get me exactly what I want. We just released, for example, our latest fraud report, our fraud lab report. It’s got data from over a billion customer interactions in 200 countries. We do it every year. And to build it, we used AI to develop the creative.

And the time savings and the quality that we got from that is remarkable. So I’m finding people that used to be afraid of it are now seeing the potential and going, wow, this is so cool. I can be even better. My thinking can come to life in even bigger, more visionary ways.

Toni Collis:

Yeah, I mean, I love that. That’s certainly what I’m seeing. I mean, I’m using AI daily and what it’s doing is it definitely doesn’t replace me, but what it does is the stuff I’m doing, I think is higher quality. I truly believe that. And certainly I get feedback from my community that it is and I can do more of it. Actually, it frees me up to do more coaching, which is my passion. And I’m definitely an industry where we’re not replacing me anytime soon, I tell you. We’re going to need coaches for a long time to come.

Karen:

How do you use it? How are you using AI day to day?

Toni Collis:

I mean, because I’m CEO of a tiny company, so I use it to help me prep for these podcasts, for example. It just takes me less time to, typically, a couple of years ago, I spent about five hours prepping for every podcast. Today I do it in about an hour. It’s just so different. I think I’m more on message. I use it to look through market research. Like what are women in tech struggling with right now? I use it with permission from my clients.

Especially when I’m doing a group event, we use an AI recorder to record notes, share notes with clients. That then also helps me figure out where have I got a group all struggling with the same thing? Okay, I need to put a training out about that, because I’m always developing training from my clients, not just like what I make public on the podcast, but training libraries. And it helps me make better decisions, but you do have to prompt it right. It’s always forgetting what you’ve told it.

and will just go off on its own little thing. It’s not strategic yet. Maybe the word is yet, but I’m certainly not, the number of times I’m like, my God, how did it get there? Like, no. You have to just bring it back to the reality you want. So I definitely see a huge opportunity, but I think a lot of people are fearful. And I think what I see, again, know, talking to women who I strongly admire, but have spent their entire lives not using AI, because it’s so new.

They were like, if I adopt it, does that make me somehow less? And I’m like, no, it makes you more and it’s going to keep you relevant, right?

Karen:

for sure, for sure. you know, the only way forward is to just dive in and to start practicing and using. And the more you do, the more you will learn, the more value you will see, the more you’ll stumble on new use cases.

And I’ve noticed lately, just in listening to a number of interviews from CEOs, how many CEOs seem to use it to consult on thought partner type questions. What are some strategic choices here? What are the pros and cons of them? Based on the interactions you’ve seen me have over the last couple weeks, what are the three or four most important things you think I should be focused on today to close out the week. It’s really interesting how different people at different functions in the organization are using it and finding really just meaningful value.

Toni Collis:

Yeah. Well, let’s go back to cybersecurity and AI then because what I really want to get, because, know, obviously it’s your passion point this, but you’re also living it. You’re using AI. So what are you doing internally? your comment earlier about it’s not just authenticating humans. You’ve now got to authenticate an agent. What does that look like? This is something I have not even thought about. Maybe that is very naive of me. I use a couple of different AI tools, big ones, everybody would know. And I haven’t put any additional cyber security in place. Maybe I’ve just made myself very vulnerable. Because I’ve just admitted that in the podcast. Well, maybe I’m going to be taking some homework before this podcast goes live. What does it look like internally in interest to take care of this agent problem? Like what are you doing?

Karen:

Well, we’re still in the early stages there as well, but I think if you look across the industry, everyone is recognizing this is a really important thing to sort out because we are used to authenticating, to verifying the identity of people or devices accessing the network and then re-authenticating them every time they come in. Now you’ve got what could be just a mass proliferation of agents acting independently at, know, direction you’ve given them, but they’re acting independently and can go anywhere in the network and see anything. So you have to have some pretty tight rules and restrictions on where they can and can’t go, what they can and can’t have access to. And we also always are thinking about you not only have to authenticate that agent’s identity,

but also verify their intent so that you know where they are likely to be headed in your network. They’re not going to go rogue. So it is a whole new world. And because there’s such a proliferation of agents in the offing, mean, obviously there’s a lot of talk about agents right now. It’s still developing, but as more and more of these are deployed for transactions, they talk about all of us as consumers being able to use them for transactions on the web, and an agent can go and act on your behalf to make a purchase. And if it’s got your instructions, it can just do it without you being there. You don’t have to think very hard to realize there are some real areas of risk if these things aren’t properly deployed and managed and authenticated ongoing.

Toni:

Yeah it really makes you think, I mean I think I’m maybe being quite cautious, although as an early adopter of AI, well LLMs, I am very reluctant to give them access to too much. You know, there’s now an open AI browser for example, I’m not using it because then it will literally read everything I’m logged into. Like things like, you know, all my notes from my client conversations, if that’s open it can read that and I at the moment don’t trust that that’s secure and that’s very confidential information. Is that a right level of scepticism in your mind at this point or should we all be doing something a different?

Karen:

Yes, yes, I mean, well, in the corporate environment, we have kind of a walled garden, right? We have our own instance. And so we’ve got all of our access to all the data across the company within this environment and it’s secure. It’s protected by all of our standard measures. We’re not

Nobody in our company is going out to chat GPT or Gemini or uploading. If they are, they shouldn’t be. We’re not uploading files there because then it’s in the ether. Anyone can access it. It’s confidential information and if a bad actor can get it, they will. So I do think you’re right to be cautious and I think this is something that, you know, if you don’t ultimately have your own instance of it, I imagine there’ll be more more security protections built in for small business people or others that want to leverage it but have these concerns and your right to be concerned about it.

Toni:

So just before we move on, I’ve got some more questions to ask you on a different theme because you’re an extraordinary human. But before we do that, the final question, if there’s a leader listening who’s thinking, okay, my company, know, startups, something like that, we’re just not paying enough attention to this. What would be the one thing you need them to hear that they need to be concerned about with AI and cybersecurity.

Karen:

that it cannot be ignored. It will ignore it at your peril. AI is a set of capabilities that is evolving very rapidly. It’s impacting every aspect of business, not just cybersecurity and the tools internally. And so you really have to have a strategy. You have to be thinking about. As we’re using AI, how do we bake in security considerations and make sure that we’re responsible with this? We’re protecting our data, our proprietary information, we’re protecting our customers’ proprietary information. Because once you lose that customer trust, it’s not coming back. you really, there is, and there’s a whole burgeoning area of regulation all over the world. Obviously, the US is a little bit behind, I think, where other areas are. But countries are really realizing this has to be dealt with, hopefully in a way that is guardrails but not squashing innovation. But there’s a lot of consumer protection and just confidentiality questions to be considered.

Toni:

Yeah, 100%. Well, okay, let’s shift gears. Let’s talk about leadership, credibility and boardroom. You have strong opinions about the boardroom. Let’s go with that, shall we? When you and I spoke before. Tell us a little bit about where you think maybe some of the conversations around cybersecurity are going right or going wrong in the boardroom. Tell us a little bit about that.

Karen:

You know, I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but what I see is over the past five years as threats and breaches have just accelerated madly, the boardroom has taken notice because the risk, the financial risk, the brand reputation risk, the risk of you personally being liable, a CEO personally being liable, a CISO personally being liable, it’s got people’s attention.

We now have CIOs and CISOs talking to the board regularly. Our company does, I think every company does. You know, giving updates on the cyber strategy and what we’re doing, what we’re seeing, how we’re protecting. And if you have a breach, guys, the average cost of a breach, I want to say now in the US is like $10 million. It’s, yeah, it is insane. So this is serious stuff. And that’s probably the least of your problems because you’ve got all the customer and reputational damage and employee trust issues that follow as well. I think that’s been just a rising, a topic of rising interest and scrutiny. putting a huge amount of pressure on CIOs and CISOs. There was just a study I saw, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal about how the anxiety that people in those functions are now starting to feel.

when anything goes wrong, you know, because the stakes are so high, they know they have to answer the board. They’re dealing with a lot of pressure. So that’s just one piece of it. Now we have this new factor of AI coming into the mix. And I’m not sure yet how much the boards are connecting AI to cyber risk. I think that’s something we have to educate them about. But we all are living with, you know, this exhortation to get out there leverage AI, transform your business, let it be a force multiplier, but also think about the security and privacy considerations. So our big conversations are how are we going to use this to accelerate the business to reach a new level of scale and excellence and expertise? I think everybody feels behind, Toni, you know, no matter, I’m not sure we actually are, but I think we all feel behind and we always hear from our chairman of our board, well, you know, I’m on the board of this company and they’re able to do this much more thanks to AI. And there are all these different use cases. So you kind of have to think about what are the use cases where you can drive traction most readily first? And where are you doing maybe a little more experimentation? I think the key thing is to have focus but to be thoughtful and to not let The excitement and energy of the board lead you to start just doing random acts of AI without real intention behind them.

Toni:

I think that’s a really good point. think sometimes, I mean, boards, I’m a board member myself. It’s really important to go in with ideas, advice, but we also, are the experts in the room every day and I think that’s sometimes forgotten and we really do need people like you to come in and explain to us what’s really going on in each individual function. And maybe we’re just not listening to the cybersecurity side of it enough because there’s so much pressure to do more and more and more AI.

Karen:

There really is. I’ll tell you though, our board is phenomenal and the best conversations we have with them are they’re not presentations, they’re conversations and discussions. If you can really engage them and hear the challenges we’re facing as a business, they all have a wealth of experience and the ideas that come from those conversations are incredible. I appreciate they’re trying to bring the new ideas and push and you just have to have that lens and I think not feel defensive but open yourself to the ideas. Explain where you disagree and why or where you see challenges and why but be open to what they’re sharing because these are folks who have seen a lot throughout their careers and really can help you open the aperture for how you’re managing your business.

Toni:

Yeah, I hope everybody hears this and thinks, gosh, yes, maybe it’s time to listen to our security team. Well, maybe, I know some startups don’t get security in place very early. You know, it’s a couple of companies I’ve worked with over the time who are in hyper growth mode and still don’t have security as a high priority. And this is scary, right? I mean, when I was working with them, it’s scary. I think it’s scarier today. So I’m hoping that people listening can go and advocate for it.

Karen:

lord. That scares me. Yeah. It’s imperative. everything is now online, all day, every day, mobile, the proliferation of devices, proliferation of data. Now we’ve got agents in the mix. If you are not thinking security, you’re making a grave error that could put your business at risk. You know, we talk so much, there’s so much fear, uncertainty, doubt in cybersecurity marketing, and we try to really shift it and focus more on You can’t grow without it. You have to think of security as a growth enabler, because otherwise you’re going to be stymied at every turn in this increasingly always on digital, omni-channel world. It has to be baked in. And it’s going to enable you to do the things you want to do. Like, nobody comes to me and says, I need a new PKI. They say, I’m trying to stand up this e-commerce division for our company. I’ve got a secure the website and the way we interact with customers. Those are the business problems they’re solving. But if you’re not thinking about the security underneath that, you’re really setting yourself up for problems.

Toni:

I could talk about this all day, but we do need to move on. And it’s a fun topic. Well, maybe scary is actually the right word. Terrifying. It’s a good topic. And I really hope listeners are thinking, whatever role you’re in, by the way, listeners, you don’t need to be in an engineering or security role to be the one advocating here. You really don’t.

Karen:

no, no, it’s especially marketing and the role of trust and engaging your customers. You want a brand that customers trust. If you don’t have security in those interactions at every turn, you’re going to have problems. And also, you know, I think there was a mindset for many years, minimal friction in those customer experiences. And there’s still a lot of that. But consumers are becoming a lot wiser to the fact that There’s a lot of risk in these digital interactions and depending on what it is, I we’ve all had a credit card stolen or a number stolen what have you. If you don’t receive, think if you’re dealing with your bank online, if you don’t receive the appropriate level of gating and questions, you’re going to start to wonder, should I be banking with these people? Right? And that goes for any relationship you have digitally. There has to be a certain amount of not just the one-time verification, kind of a re-verification of your identity ongoing so that they’re not letting the bad guys into your account. And if you don’t see that as a consumer, you ought to be asking questions.

Toni:

100%, I completely agree with that. So listeners, pay attention. We do need to move on to the quick fire round and I have my favourite question up first. Are we ready for this?

Karen:

Cool. I’ll do my best.

Toni:

Okay, I love this question because I get the most curious answers. what is the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Karen:

Do you know, I think focus on improving your weaknesses is something that, it’s not a terrible piece of advice, but it leads me, it led me for many years to try and fix things that maybe, even if I fixed them, they weren’t going to be great. And the better advice to me was lean into your strengths. Like some weaknesses are just weaknesses, and if they’re, you know, if, You kind of have to learn to manage them to compensate with the people you surround yourself with. But I’m never going to be a coder. That’s just not in like, yeah, that’s a gap. But I can find other people with that strength to surround me and support me. I’ve got other strengths that really, if I put the pedal to the metal, can take me so much farther than trying to build on, you know, weaknesses that just maybe are not part of my fundamental DNA and makeup. So That’s an area, I know it’s a little nuanced, because you don’t want to let every weakness go. There are certainly always areas you’ve got to work at. But I just think when you’re weighing it, lean into the strengths versus trying to fix weaknesses. Always lean into your strengths. You can correct for weaknesses with who you surround yourself with.

Toni:

I love that. Yeah, 100%. I mean, that’s something I live by. Hire people that have a different zone of genius to you. Their zone of genius is your zone of drudgery. That’s my mantra with clients. Hire people not like you. We all tend to hire people like us. It’s not the best thing.

Karen:

Yes, you have to. You have to because everybody’s passionate about something and it’s very hard to develop passion over something like that. I’m never going to have passion over geometry or coding, know, actual doing the coding. I do have a lot of passion about figuring out how to explain some of those complex technical topics to customers in a way that helps them see the value it can create for their business.

Toni:

 that, I speak my kind of language. This is why we get on so well. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Karen:

think two things, one is never stop learning. Never, ever, ever, you’re never done. And this is apropos for the conversation we’re having right now, right? Because it’s easy as you get later in your career to think I know everything, you don’t. like the moment we’re in right now is just proof. You can choose to put your hand in sand, I’m not going to learn that, or you can dig in and be so much bigger and better as a leader and as a person.

It’s so important to keep expanding your horizons and learning and trying new things. And if you don’t, obviously you’re going to be left behind. I think the other really excellent piece of advice I once got is giving feedback to people, especially your team. A friend once said to me, you know, you have a choice with every interaction when you’re giving feedback of how people leave.

you feeling when they leave that room? Do they feel deflated or do they feel inspired and a renewed sense of possibility and where they can go? And I really think about that a lot because even when you’re delivering hard feedback, it doesn’t have to be harsh. You can deliver it in a way so that people see, this is a challenge, but here’s where you can go. Here’s what I believe is in you and how you can you can start to become bigger and better and more impactful. So I always try to think about how do you leave people feeling that sense of possibility and inspiration versus deflated.

Toni:

Yeah, I love that too, that’s so beautiful. You really do have a choice and I think sometimes the choice should be, I say this as a coach, sometimes it’s rare, but sometimes the choice is to leave that person feeling uncomfortable because you need them to grow. But often, I don’t think people think through how that person is feeling. We’re uncomfortable, we’ve just done something difficult.

giving some feedback to somebody, we’re so internalizing it that we either fall into people pleasing, at which point our feedback is diluted, or we fail because when you’re stressed like that, your emotional intelligence comes down, you fail to realize how that person’s really feeling and therefore you don’t leave them in the best place to action that feedback. So I love that. Just take a moment, slow down, think about how that person’s going to feel, you have a choice. I love that, love that so much.

Karen:

And also, you I mean, you’ve really got to tailor it to the individual and how what’s going to speak and resonate to them. think every human is complicated and different. And you have to just have to take a moment and think when you’re giving feedback. So often I think it’s easy to kind of turn inward and like, I’ve got to this hard time. Really should be thinking outward. Like, how can this be a moment of giving, of helping? of enabling and what does this person need to connect with this feedback.

Toni:

Yeah, yeah, I love that so much. beautiful. This has been amazing, so thank you so much, Karen. Where can we find you online? Where we can find out more about you and what you do, connect with you, where can we find you?

Karen:

Well, LinkedIn is a great place and intrust.com of course and then my email is karen.kalkel at intrust.com. I’d welcome any outreach, anytime. I love to connect with people, love to talk about cyber and what it means and how cyber and AI are coming together to make this world a lot more interesting, a lot more complex, but interesting and a little bit more scary in some ways, but mostly good. So, I’d just love to hear from anyone.

Toni:

Absolutely, and I think I really encourage anybody who’s interested in the cyber security AI mind field to reach out to Karen. She’s got a lot of wisdom to share and resources as well, so please do reach out. I want to just ask you one more question. What do you want to leave us with today? What are your final thoughts after today’s conversation, Karen?

Karen:

I think that’s a great question. I think cybersecurity and AI are converging and you have to think of both together. And AI is really just a set of capabilities that’s going to be a force multiplier in business. So I’m really saying is like, you’ve got to think about cybersecurity and bringing security into your business at every step. It’s critical.

If you don’t have the trust of your customers, of your partners, your end consumers, your employees, you’re going to have problems. So you’ve really got to think about how and where do I need to make security into every interaction my business is having. But you also have to think about, it’s not just about the tools, there’s also a human element that has to be considered. And it’s not just all about bots and agents. Customers, your employees want to know there are human beings who are thoughtfully managing all of this behind the scenes and can troubleshoot when needed. So I think don’t over-rotate to one extreme or the other. There’s still a need for balance and I think that’s the wise approach.

Toni;

Well, thank you so much for this conversation, Karen. It has been an absolute joy. I just want to leave listeners with this. I think you hit on the point right there at the end. This isn’t about just cyber threats. This is trust. This is trust for your partners, your employees, your consumers. And I want every single one of you listening. You’re listening because you’re a leader or an aspiring leader, a sub description. I don’t care that your job is not a CZO. If that’s not your job, maybe you are, but I don’t care so much as I want to tell you that as a leader, it is part of your job to raise a flag of awareness around any issue that you think is important. And I think this one is definitely worth raising a flag about. So if you are seeing a gap in your organization, take this episode as a cue to go and be the leader who says, hey, I think we’ve missed something. You don’t have to be an expert, you just have to go on raising the flag. That is true leadership and I encourage you to do that.

So thank you, Karen, so much for joining us today, inspiring us both as your journey to being such an extraordinary human communicator, CMO, and also to talk about this topic. Thank you very much. I’ll see you all next time. Bye for now.