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Introduction: Cybersecurity Has Outgrown the Server Room
Cybersecurity used to be viewed primarily as a technical discipline. Firewalls, endpoint protection, vulnerability management, identity systems, security monitoring, and incident response were the tools of the trade. But that model is rapidly becoming outdated.
Today, the modern Chief Information Security Officer must operate in a much larger arena. A CISO is expected to understand technology, business strategy, financial consequences, organizational culture, regulatory expectations, and increasingly artificial intelligence. The job is no longer simply to keep attackers out. It is to help an organization understand risk, make difficult decisions, protect its ability to operate, and prepare for threats that may not even exist in their current form.
That transformation is at the heart of a detailed conversation between Dark Reading’s Kristina Beek and Cezary Piekarski, Group CISO at Standard Chartered. Piekarski’s career journey, his approach to building security teams, and his views on AI offer a broader lesson for the entire cybersecurity industry: technical expertise remains essential, but technical expertise alone is no longer enough.
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A Career Built on Curiosity
Piekarski’s introduction to cybersecurity did not begin with an executive title or a carefully designed career plan. It began with curiosity.
He describes experimenting with early technology, including the early days of Slackware Linux, and developing an interest in breaking and fixing things. Another important influence was Clifford Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg, an early account of hacking and cyber defense that helped spark his interest during his teenage years.
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That story is important because curiosity remains one of the strongest characteristics in cybersecurity. Technology changes too quickly for professionals to rely entirely on what they already know. The security practitioner who stops experimenting eventually risks becoming less prepared than the attacker who continues learning.
From Engineer to Business Professional
Piekarski’s career later moved through engineering and consultancy before reaching banking leadership.
He describes himself as an engineer who was not necessarily the greatest engineer, but his experience at a Big Four consultancy gave him something that became increasingly valuable: an understanding of how businesses actually operate.
Consultancy exposed him to commercial decision-making and the reality that executives must think about profitability, resources, customers, and trade-offs. In his view, this experience became an important foundation for eventually becoming an effective security executive.
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The First Lesson for Future CISOs
The lesson is straightforward: a cybersecurity career does not have to move in a perfectly straight technical line.
Security professionals can gain enormous value from understanding finance, operations, consulting, product development, communications, and organizational leadership. The more effectively a CISO can understand the business, the more effectively that CISO can explain why security matters to it.
This is becoming increasingly important because security decisions rarely exist in isolation.
A company may want to launch a product faster. A security team may want additional controls. Finance may want to reduce spending. Engineers may want flexibility. Regulators may require stronger safeguards.
The CISO sits directly in the middle of these competing priorities.
Building Teams Around a Mission
One of the strongest themes in
He attributes much of the success of his security organization to the team around him and argues that successful cybersecurity teams need a shared understanding of why their work matters. Protecting customers, colleagues, communities, and the wider financial ecosystem creates a purpose that goes beyond simply completing security tasks.
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This distinction matters.
A team that exists only to close tickets can become exhausted. A team that understands the consequences of its work can remain motivated even when the workload becomes overwhelming.
Knowledge Sharing Creates Stronger Defenders
Piekarski also emphasizes knowledge sharing.
He points to activities such as capture-the-flag competitions, informal learning sessions, and simply exchanging interesting discoveries with colleagues. These activities create an environment where professionals can challenge one another, learn faster, and develop stronger capabilities.
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Cybersecurity is particularly dependent on this culture because no individual can understand the entire threat landscape.
One engineer may understand identity systems. Another may specialize in cloud security. Another may know malware analysis. Someone else may understand threat intelligence or application security.
A mature security organization turns those individual capabilities into collective intelligence.
The CISO Is No Longer Just the Security Technologist
The most important argument in the interview concerns the changing role of the CISO.
Piekarski describes the position as requiring at least three difficult combinations: business leadership, technological understanding, and cultural influence. A CISO must understand the company’s business model, participate in meaningful discussions about business decisions and trade-offs, influence technology strategy, and help establish an appropriate security culture.
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That is a remarkably broad job description.
The modern CISO is simultaneously expected to understand the technical environment and explain its consequences to people who may never look at a security dashboard.
The CISO as a Business Executive
Security leaders increasingly need to speak the language of business.
Instead of saying, “This vulnerability has a high severity score,” the effective executive conversation may need to explain how exploitation could affect customers, operations, regulatory obligations, revenue, capital deployment, or the organization’s ability to operate.
That is a fundamentally different communication model.
The technical information still matters. But the information becomes useful only when decision-makers understand what it means.
Security Cannot Become a Collection of Silos
Piekarski makes another important distinction: the CISO cannot simply become the organization’s “CIO of security.”
Running vulnerability management, identity management, security platforms, or other individual services is not the same as owning the organization’s overall security posture.
A CISO must understand the larger picture.
That means asking how security decisions interact with business strategy, technology choices, investment priorities, operational resilience, and the organization’s broader ability to function.
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Risk Conversations Should Be Adult Conversations
One particularly powerful concept in the interview is the idea of having an “adult” conversation about risk.
Security should not be based entirely on fear.
Business leaders routinely make decisions involving uncertainty. They evaluate costs, benefits, opportunities, risks, and alternatives. Cybersecurity should participate in that process rather than attempting to stop every activity that introduces risk.
The
It is to explain the consequences of saying “yes,” “no,” or “not yet.”
The Pressure of Protecting a Bank
The financial sector presents an especially demanding cybersecurity environment because the consequences of failure can be enormous.
Banks hold sensitive information, move money, support critical economic activity, and operate within highly regulated environments. Piekarski acknowledges the weight of this responsibility and describes the constant pressure that comes with the role.
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But he also makes an interesting observation: financial institutions can benefit from a relatively mature cybersecurity culture.
Regulators, industry peers, and organizational leadership understand the importance of security. This can make it easier for security executives to find partners for important initiatives.
Worrying Productively
Perhaps the most memorable idea from the conversation is Piekarski’s concept of “worrying productively.”
A CISO is paid to worry. Threats are everywhere. Vulnerabilities continue to emerge. Criminal groups evolve. Technology changes. Third-party ecosystems create additional dependencies.
But anxiety alone does nothing.
The challenge is to transform concern into action.
That means identifying the signal hidden inside the noise, prioritizing realistic threats, assigning resources, improving defenses, and helping the organization make informed decisions.
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Signal Versus Noise
Modern security teams are drowning in information.
Threat feeds generate alerts. Vulnerability databases grow constantly. Security vendors publish warnings. Researchers disclose new techniques. Attackers experiment with new methods.
If everything is treated as an emergency, nothing is truly prioritized.
The mature security organization therefore needs mechanisms for determining what actually matters.
This is where automation, threat intelligence, analytics, and eventually AI become increasingly important.
AI Changes Both Sides of the Battlefield
Piekarski describes AI as one of the major technological pivots affecting cybersecurity.
His organization considers AI from multiple perspectives: business capabilities, defensive capabilities, workforce skills, adversarial activity, and the security implications of AI systems themselves.
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That last point is particularly significant.
Organizations cannot simply deploy AI and assume that AI automatically improves security.
AI introduces new attack surfaces, new dependencies, new data risks, new software behaviors, and new opportunities for attackers.
The security strategy must therefore evolve alongside AI adoption.
The AI Skills Revolution
The rise of AI also changes what cybersecurity professionals need to know.
Piekarski argues that new skills are emerging and that professionals must learn capabilities that were largely unknown to the industry only a short time ago.
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This suggests that the next generation of cybersecurity professionals may need to combine traditional security knowledge with AI engineering, automation, data analysis, model security, identity management, and software development.
The winning professional will not necessarily be the person who knows the most individual commands.
It may be the person who can design, supervise, and improve automated systems capable of handling thousands of security decisions.
Will AI Destroy Cybersecurity Jobs?
Piekarski rejects the idea that AI will simply eliminate cybersecurity employment.
His argument is more nuanced: jobs will change shape.
Some repetitive tasks may become automated. Certain manual processes may disappear or become dramatically faster. But new problems will emerge, requiring new skills and new forms of expertise.
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That distinction is critical.
Technology has historically eliminated some tasks while creating others.
Cybersecurity is particularly likely to follow this pattern because every major technological shift produces new security challenges.
The Future Is Intelligence-Led
Piekarski’s vision for cybersecurity is increasingly integrated, intelligence-led, and automated.
He expects security operations to involve systems and “robots” performing more protective processes, while human professionals move toward becoming trust builders, system curators, engineers, and decision-makers.
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This does not mean humans disappear.
It means their responsibilities move upward.
Instead of manually investigating every alert, security professionals may increasingly design the systems that determine which alerts deserve human attention.
Deep Analysis: What an AI-Driven Security Operation Could Look Like
Start With the Environment
A security team can begin by understanding its exposed assets, identities, applications, and infrastructure.
Inventory listening services on an authorized Linux system ss -tulpn
The command is simple, but the principle is powerful: security automation needs reliable visibility before it can make intelligent decisions.
Inspect System Activity
Security teams can also examine authentication and system events.
Review recent authentication activity last
Inspect recent system log entries
journalctl -n 100
The objective is not to blindly automate responses. It is to build a reliable stream of information that analysts and defensive systems can interpret.
Check for Unexpected Changes
File integrity monitoring can help identify suspicious modifications.
Generate hashes for selected files sha256sum /path/to/file
In production, dedicated integrity-monitoring systems should normally be used rather than relying on manual commands.
Automate Defensive Workflows
A mature security architecture can eventually connect detection systems to automated workflows:
Alert
↓
Risk Scoring
↓
Threat Intelligence
↓
Context Enrichment
↓
Automated Containment
↓
Human Review
↓
Recovery and Lessons Learned
The key is that automation should not simply generate more alerts. It should reduce noise and improve decision quality.
Keep Humans in the Loop
High-impact actions should have appropriate authorization and safeguards.
AI detects anomaly
↓
Confidence assessment
↓
Policy evaluation
↓
Low-risk action → automatic response
↓
High-risk action → human approval
This approach reflects the larger direction described by Piekarski: humans increasingly become curators and trust builders around automated security systems rather than performing every repetitive operation themselves.
The Hidden Challenge: AI Security Is Also Business Security
AI security cannot be isolated inside an AI engineering team.
A financial institution deploying AI must consider the model itself, the data feeding it, the infrastructure supporting it, third-party providers, APIs, identities, employees, applications, and customers.
A vulnerability somewhere in that chain can become an organizational security problem.
This is why
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What Undercode Say: The CISO Has Become a Strategic Control Tower
The Old Model Is Breaking
The traditional model placed cybersecurity largely inside the technology organization.
That model worked better when infrastructure was more centralized and security threats were easier to compartmentalize.
Today, companies depend on cloud platforms, SaaS providers, APIs, contractors, AI systems, remote identities, mobile devices, software supply chains, and external data.
The perimeter has effectively become an ecosystem.
Security Is Now a Business Function
The strongest point in
A ransomware incident can become an operational crisis.
A data breach can become a regulatory problem.
An identity compromise can become a financial loss.
An AI failure can become a reputational event.
A third-party compromise can affect an organization that never directly interacted with the attacker.
The CISO therefore needs visibility far beyond security tools.
Technical Excellence Still Matters
The evolution toward business leadership should not be misunderstood.
A CISO who does not understand technology will struggle to challenge technical assumptions or guide architecture.
Business knowledge cannot replace technical credibility.
The future CISO needs both.
Communication Is a Security Control
Poor communication creates risk.
If executives cannot understand a security problem, they cannot make good decisions about it.
If engineers do not understand the
If employees do not understand why security policies exist, they may work around them.
Communication therefore becomes part of the control environment.
Mission Creates Resilience
Cybersecurity is exhausting.
There will always be another vulnerability, another attack, another alert, another incident, and another technology to understand.
Mission can provide the psychological foundation required to continue.
When professionals understand who they are protecting and why the work matters, security becomes more than an endless queue of problems.
Knowledge Sharing Multiplies Talent
A security organization does not become strong merely by hiring talented individuals.
It becomes strong when those individuals teach one another.
Capture-the-flag exercises, technical discussions, research sessions, internal presentations, and informal knowledge sharing can transform individual expertise into organizational capability.
The Best Teams Challenge Each Other
A culture where everyone agrees can become dangerous.
Security professionals need to challenge assumptions.
They should ask whether a control actually works, whether a threat is realistic, whether a vulnerability matters in context, and whether a security investment produces measurable value.
Healthy disagreement improves defense.
Noise Is Becoming a Strategic Threat
Security teams are overwhelmed by information.
The problem is no longer simply a shortage of data.
It is the shortage of attention.
AI could help solve this by correlating events, identifying patterns, prioritizing alerts, and summarizing complex situations.
But poorly designed AI could also make the problem worse.
AI Should Reduce Cognitive Load
The best use of AI in security may not be replacing analysts.
It may be giving analysts more time to think.
An AI system that investigates thousands of events and presents the ten most important findings could be more valuable than one that generates thousands of additional automated notifications.
Automation Requires Trust
The more power organizations give automated security systems, the more important governance becomes.
A system capable of isolating devices, disabling identities, blocking transactions, or changing access policies can cause significant damage if it makes the wrong decision.
Automation must therefore be accompanied by confidence thresholds, authorization controls, logging, monitoring, rollback mechanisms, and human oversight.
The Human Role Is Moving Upward
Cybersecurity professionals may increasingly spend less time executing repetitive procedures.
Their role could shift toward designing systems, validating automated decisions, investigating unusual cases, developing security strategy, and managing complex risk.
That is not the disappearance of cybersecurity expertise.
It is the elevation of cybersecurity expertise.
CISO Success Will Be Measured Differently
The future CISO may be judged less by the number of security tools deployed and more by whether the organization can safely pursue its strategic objectives.
That means measuring resilience, response capability, risk reduction, business enablement, recovery speed, and decision quality.
Security Budgets Need Context
Simply increasing security spending does not guarantee better security.
Organizations need to understand where additional investment reduces meaningful risk.
The CISO must therefore be able to explain why a specific investment matters and what alternative risks remain if the organization chooses not to make it.
Financial Services Offers an Important Model
The financial industry demonstrates how regulation, competition, and institutional awareness can create stronger security expectations.
Other industries may eventually face similar pressure as cyberattacks become increasingly disruptive.
Healthcare Faces a Different Challenge
Healthcare has extremely critical security requirements, but organizations can face different investment pressures and operational constraints.
The lesson is that security maturity cannot be copied blindly from one industry to another.
Third Parties Expand the Attack Surface
Organizations are increasingly dependent on vendors.
A company’s security posture is therefore partly determined by organizations outside its direct control.
AI makes this even more complicated because modern applications may depend on external models, APIs, cloud infrastructure, data providers, and software components.
Fourth-Party Risk Matters Too
The chain does not stop at the immediate supplier.
A supplier may itself depend on another provider.
This creates deeper layers of dependency that traditional security assessments may not fully capture.
AI Accelerates Change
AI compresses development cycles and increases the speed at which organizations introduce new capabilities.
Security teams therefore need to operate faster.
A manual security process designed for a slower technology environment may become a bottleneck.
Speed Creates New Risk
Moving faster also creates opportunities for mistakes.
The challenge is to build security systems that can operate at the same velocity as modern engineering teams.
This is where automation becomes essential.
Security Architecture Must Become Adaptive
Static security controls are increasingly insufficient.
Organizations need systems that can observe changing conditions, evaluate risk, and adjust defensive responses.
Intelligence Becomes the Foundation
The future security organization will likely depend heavily on intelligence.
That includes understanding assets, identities, vulnerabilities, attacker behavior, business context, and current organizational priorities.
Raw telemetry alone is not intelligence.
Context turns information into intelligence.
The CISO Becomes an Interpreter
One of the most valuable functions of a senior security executive is translating complexity.
The board needs business implications.
Engineers need technical requirements.
Regulators need evidence of control.
Employees need understandable guidance.
The CISO must connect all four.
Curiosity Will Remain Valuable
Despite all the talk about AI and automation, one characteristic from Piekarski’s early career remains especially relevant: curiosity.
Cybersecurity professionals need to keep asking how systems work, how they fail, and how they can be improved.
AI Will Change the Entry Path
New professionals may enter cybersecurity through AI engineering, data analysis, software development, cloud infrastructure, or automation rather than through traditional security pathways.
That could broaden the talent pool.
Cybersecurity May Become More Attractive
If
Instead, it could create new specialties and new career paths.
The Job Will Become More Abstract
Security professionals may increasingly solve higher-level problems.
Instead of asking, “How do I investigate this alert?” they may ask, “How should this detection system be designed so that this class of attack is identified automatically?”
Engineering Will Become More Important
Automation does not eliminate engineering.
It increases the importance of engineering because organizations need reliable systems capable of operating at high speed without creating uncontrolled risk.
Trust Will Become a Core Security Skill
As automated systems make more decisions, people need to understand when those decisions can be trusted.
Trust will therefore become both a technical and organizational discipline.
The First Try Matters More
Piekarski predicts a future with greater velocity and a higher need to be right on the first try.
That creates a difficult paradox.
Organizations must move faster while becoming more accurate.
Testing Becomes Critical
Automation should be tested before it receives authority over important systems.
Simulated incidents, adversarial testing, red-team exercises, and controlled deployments become increasingly important.
Security Culture Must Evolve
Technology cannot create a mature security culture by itself.
Leadership behavior, incentives, training, communication, accountability, and organizational values still matter.
The Best CISO Is Not the Loudest
Effective security leadership does not require constant alarm.
It requires judgment.
The ability to remain calm while recognizing genuine danger may be more valuable than the ability to generate fear.
Productive Discomfort Is Healthy
A CISO should be uncomfortable enough to challenge assumptions but disciplined enough to avoid turning every concern into a crisis.
That balance is difficult.
Cybersecurity Is Ultimately About People
Behind every security control is a person.
Employees use the systems.
Customers trust the institution.
Engineers build the applications.
Executives allocate resources.
Security teams protect the ecosystem.
Technology matters, but people determine how effectively it is used.
The Strategic CISO Is Already Here
Piekarski’s career reflects a broader transformation already underway.
The CISO is evolving from technical guardian to strategic leader.
That transformation will likely accelerate as AI, cloud computing, automation, and interconnected ecosystems continue reshaping business.
✅ CISO Responsibilities Are Expanding
The source clearly supports the claim that modern CISOs need business knowledge, technology expertise, cultural influence, communication skills, and team-building capabilities.
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This is presented directly through
✅ AI Is Changing Cybersecurity Work
The interview explicitly states that cybersecurity jobs are already changing and that new skills and technologies are emerging.
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The important qualification is that the source does not claim every existing security job will remain unchanged.
✅ Automation Is Expected to Increase
Piekarski explicitly describes a future that is more integrated, intelligence-led, and automated, with humans increasingly acting as curators and trust builders around automated protective systems.
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This supports the
❌ AI Is Not Described as a Simple Job Replacement
The source does not support the claim that AI will simply eliminate cybersecurity professionals.
Piekarski instead argues that the number of opportunities may continue increasing while the nature of the work changes.
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✅ Financial Institutions Face Major Security Accountability
The source supports the characterization of banking as an environment with significant cybersecurity accountability, while also noting that financial institutions benefit from regulatory maturity and widespread awareness of security risks.
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Prediction
(+1) AI Will Create a More Automated Security Workforce
AI is likely to absorb an increasing share of repetitive monitoring, investigation, correlation, and response tasks.
Human professionals will increasingly focus on architecture, governance, complex investigations, strategy, and oversight.
(+1) Business Skills Will Become Essential for Senior Security Leaders
The ability to explain cyber-risk in terms of business impact will become increasingly important for CISOs.
Security leaders who cannot communicate with executives may struggle to influence strategic decisions.
(+1) Security Teams Will Become More Intelligence-Led
Organizations will increasingly prioritize contextual intelligence over raw alert volume.
The winners will be teams capable of identifying the signals that actually require action.
(+1) Cybersecurity Career Paths Will Broaden
AI engineering, automation, cloud infrastructure, data science, software development, and security engineering will increasingly overlap.
This could bring new talent into cybersecurity.
(-1) Manual Security Operations Will Lose Ground
Repetitive, predictable security tasks are likely to become increasingly automated.
Professionals who rely entirely on manual workflows may find their roles changing faster than expected.
(-1) Organizations That Treat AI as Only a Productivity Tool Will Increase Risk
Companies that deploy AI without considering model security, data protection, identity, third-party dependencies, and adversarial activity could create new vulnerabilities.
(+1) The Strategic CISO Will Become More Influential
As cyber-risk becomes inseparable from business risk, the CISO is likely to move further into strategic decision-making.
The future security leader may be less of a technical gatekeeper and more of an organizational risk architect.
Final Perspective: From Defending Systems to Protecting the Mission
The deepest message from Cezary
It is about leadership.
Cybersecurity is entering an era where technology alone cannot solve the problem. The strongest organizations will need leaders who can understand technology without becoming trapped inside it, understand business without compromising security, and understand risk without allowing fear to dictate every decision.
The future CISO will need to ask difficult questions.
What are we protecting?
What risks are actually material?
Which threats are signals and which are noise?
Where should humans make decisions?
Where should machines act?
How much automation can we trust?
What does this security decision mean for the business?
And perhaps most importantly: why does this work matter?
Piekarski’s answer is rooted in mission. Security professionals may face sleepless nights, rapidly evolving threats, overwhelming amounts of information, and an increasingly complicated technology landscape. But if cybersecurity remains connected to protecting customers, colleagues, communities, and the organizations that society depends upon, the pressure can become a source of purpose rather than paralysis.
The cybersecurity industry is changing.
AI will change the tools. Automation will change the workflows. Business transformation will change the responsibilities. But the fundamental mission remains the same: protect what matters, understand what is at risk, and make the organization stronger before the next threat arrives.
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