OWASP Phoenix Chapter April Meeting

Presenter: Gary Perkins

Presentation: AI is moving faster than most organizations can govern it. Between vendor hype, rushed deployments, and well-intentioned experiments gone sideways, it’s getting harder to tell where AI genuinely helps and where it quietly introduces new risk.

This talk takes a practical, no-nonsense look at AI through three lenses: the good, the bad, and the ugly. We’ll walk through real examples of AI done right, common failures caused by missing guardrails, and uncomfortable edge cases where AI creates more problems than it solves.

Attendees will leave with a clearer mental model of AI risk, a grounded view of where guardrails help (and where they don’t), and practical guidance for using AI without blindly trusting it.

Presenter Bio: Gary Perkins is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for cybersecurity firm CISO Global. Prior to that he was the CISO for the Government of British Columbia in Canada for 10 years -- responsible for providing cybersecurity services in support of the province and taught undergrad and graduate students at the University of Victoria for years. He has over 25 years’ experience in information technology, risk management, and cybersecurity.

Prior to joining the BC Government, he worked in the private sector as chief of staff for security at TELUS and, earlier in his career, led teams responsible for incident response, operations, delivery, and architecture for both corporate and managed security services customers. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) since 2004, Perkins also holds an MBA from Simon Fraser University’s Management of Technology program.

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