Most organizations are being asked to adopt AI faster than they can answer basic questions about how to do it safely. At the Center for Internet Security, we chose to build our AI program governance first, before scaling use across the organization. This session walks through that journey candidly, including the questions we got right early, the ones we underestimated, and the places where our first plan needed real adjustment.
Brian Calkin, CIS Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, will share how CIS stood up an AI governance board and a technical subcommittee, deployed enterprise AI tooling to staff, and worked through the security and data questions that surfaced along the way. What data can these tools touch? How do we vet vendors? Who reviews an agent before it acts on its own? How do we keep cost and sprawl under control? The talk focuses on what actually worked, what we changed, and what we are still figuring out.
For higher education, the stakes are distinctive. Research, administrative, and IT environments each carry different data sensitivities and risk tolerances, and scaling AI across all three without a shared governance foundation invites trouble. Attendees will leave with a practical starting framework they can adapt, a set of questions worth answering before broad rollout, and a clear view of the tradeoffs from an organization living them now.
Speaker: Brian Calkin, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Center for Internet Security
Brian Calkin serves as Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS®), where he leads the organization's AI strategy and innovation initiatives. In this role, he advises CIS leadership on emerging technologies, drives the adoption of artificial intelligence across the organization, and shapes the technical vision for CIS's evolving product and service portfolio.
This event is part of a Series of Cybersecurity Awareness Month events hosted by the Big Ten Academic Alliance.
Big Ten Academic Alliance
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