"Always Intentional": A CISO's Pragmatic Take on the Agentic Era

Show notes

What does it actually look like to bring AI into a threat intelligence program at one of the internet's most iconic companies?

Hello to all our Cyber Pals!

Host Selena Larson is joined by guest host, Sarah Sabotka as they chat with Sean Zadig, Chief Information Security Officer (and "Chief Paranoid") at Yahoo, for a candid conversation about the evolving intersection of AI and cybersecurity.

Sean shares how Yahoo's security team, the Paranoids, is navigating the agentic AI transformation: from running a company-wide "skill-a-thon" to get every team member building Claude-powered tools, to rethinking legacy infrastructure from the ground up. He also opens up about what keeps him up at night; including the looming threat of AI-powered exploit frameworks like Mythos, the growing signal-to-noise problem in threat intel feeds, and the very real risk of analyst burnout as the pace of the industry accelerates.

But Sean's outlook is surprisingly optimistic. He argues that defenders have a home-field advantage, that the best code ever written is just 12–18 months away, and that the goal of AI in security shouldn't be doing more with fewer people–it should be building more resilient teams.