On the 13th episode of Enterprise Software Defenders, hosts Evan Reiser and Mike Britton, both executives at Abnormal Security, talk with Jeremy Smith, Vice President and Information Security Officer at Avery Dennison. Avery Dennison is a multinational materials science company with over 34,000 employees and over $8 billion in annual revenue. They manufacture and distribute a variety of sophisticated branding labels and adhesives, including high-tech RFID inlays. In this conversation, Jeremy shares his thoughts on the evolution of cybersecurity at Avery Dennison, the advantages of AI-powered security tools, and how cutting-edge technology enables a successful defensive strategy.

Quick hits from Jeremy:

On threat actors use of AI: “You can do an investigation of a whole C suite in seconds with an AI chat bot, where before you'd have to go to a website and crawl it and search. Now you can find out so much information at the touch of your fingertips and the speed the attackers are going to be able to leverage with AI is going to have to be combated.”

On the future of Enterprise AI: “I've seen a bunch of existing vendors in the security space that are now buying AI companies to just leverage that talent internally to develop their products further. It was a CEO of one company that we work with that was just saying there's going to be two kinds of companies. Ones that leverage AI and companies that are out of business.”

On the true impact of AI: “Whether it be your network, your authentication and login activity, you kind of combine all of those data sets together and look for patterns of what's typical versus what is deviating from there, and I think that really is going to be the power of AI. Being able to analyze large quantities of data at scale and analyze it in ways that we've never been able to do before and give us insights we've never had before.”

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Enterprise Software 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 Software Defenders is produced by Josh Meer.