CISOs Finally Get a Seat at the Board's Table — But There's a Catch

According to Diana Kelley, CISO, Noma Security, CISOs are now gaining a seat at the board table as AI’s explosive growth lifts cybersecurity to become a top board agenda item, with scrutiny extending from CEOs to junior product managers about AI risk.

The piece notes a tension: boards expect rapid AI-enabled innovation while organisations face emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, data leakage, excessive agent autonomy, model poisoning, and training-data risks, all in a landscape where standards like the OWASP GenAI Project Top 10 and NIST’s AI RMF are still developing.

It argues that security leaders must move beyond saying no to innovation by embedding security thinking into AI projects from the start and building internal partnerships with product, engineering, legal, compliance and data science, as well as leveraging external expertise. The author suggests evolving playbooks to address non-deterministic AI systems, including governance, risk modelling for agents, and secure deployment architectures for GenAI, with guidance from ISO, NIST, OWASP and CSA.

The piece finishes on a call to prove value by enabling safe, rapid innovation and by moving quickly to sustain credibility and influence decisions early. The article appeared in October 2025 and runs as a four-minute read.