How CISOs Can Match the AI Era’s Need for Speed

The biggest impact of AI on a business is sheer velocity.

The market is shifting almost daily. The big AI players are in perpetual motion, releasing upgrades as they attempt to leapfrog one another. Newer, open-weight models are emerging from research labs. Meanwhile, enterprises desperately race to keep up. They’re eager to put these AI tools in employees’ hands to boost productivity because they don’t want to fall behind more nimble competition.

But that need for speed places unprecedented pressure on chief information security officers (CISOs). How do they help the business keep up with this astounding innovation while maintaining enterprise security? It’s why security leaders can feel stuck in the middle.

Machine speed problems require machine speed solutions.

Security organizations that aren’t ready to embrace this new pace and instead instinctively slam on the brakes will be making a mistake – perhaps a big one. The lines of business will just find ways to work around them and leave it for the security pros to clean up the mess after the fact when vulnerabilities are exposed. Or, even worse, they’ll put the enterprise at a severe disadvantage as competitors use AI to code faster, produce more, and operate smarter.

CISOs must be enablers for the business so it can use AI to move more quickly than ever before. That means a mindset shift in how security pros approach their role. It requires going from a hard no to a more conditional yes. As in, “Yes, we can do this, but here’s the oversight we need in place.”

That’s the transformation AI is demanding of every security organization.

How AI Is Changing Security

Two years ago, if you had asked me or any of my CISO peers about the wisdom of giving every employee the ability to connect to a data warehouse, Salesforce, or another core application, we would have said that was a crazy idea. It creates all sorts of security holes. We’d have no visibility, no control, and no way to protect it.

Now, thanks to AI, the conversation directed at CISOs has become: Why can’t you enable this? Everyone else is. They’re moving faster. They’re winning. We need to do it, too.

So, security organizations do things that traditionally have made them uncomfortable. Instead of locking everything down, the role has shifted to designing guardrails that give the business room to maneuver with AI deployments.

But old habits die hard for security leaders. Control has always been part of the job description. The answer isn’t to loosen that grip, it’s to turn a flat “no” into that “conditional yes.” As in, yes, when there’s a real business justification and the right guardrails in place. It requires security leaders to be in the room when AI is deployed, rather than reacting to it after the fact. That’s what lets the organization operate at the speed the C-suite and board demand.

The goal is to find a balance between control and speed. At Boomi, we use the analogy of brakes in motorsports. They allow race cars to go faster, not slow them down. Governance doesn’t block AI usage. It makes it safe to accelerate.

This isn’t just an aspirational goal. It can be done. It’s what we do at Boomi.

Governance Helps Boomi Move Faster

The tools we give our customers are the same ones we use every day. We rely on our platform to provide the control that gives us the confidence we’re matching speed with security in our AI initiatives. As Customer Zero, we run Boomi on Boomi. Agents are built across all our lines of business, including my own security organization, and what we learn as an operator feeds back into what we build.

Internally, we combine rigorous oversight practices with the capabilities of our Agent Control Plane, which manages every action agents take.

• Agent Control Tower. This is one place to see every agent. It serves as a centralized registry for governing agents we create internally and from third parties. That’s crucial for security organizations because if you don’t have an inventory of what agents you’re running, it’s difficult to protect the business. It enables us to monitor performance, detect anomalies, and create audit trails.
• Boomi Connect. We integrate core systems directly with AI models. This provides secure authentication through single sign-on (SSO) for greater control. Boomi Connect gives us peace of mind by linking our enterprise applications to the models we choose, with the restrictions that are best for our business.
• AI Gateway. We have a traffic cop that applies governance rules about which tools and data agents can access. It secures our MCP layer (Model Context Protocol), ensuring that agents can access only the data they need to perform their tasks. In addition to enforcing our policies, we can also manage costs by setting limits to prevent token overruns.
• Treating Agents and Skills as Code. At Boomi, we encourage employees to build agents and AI-generated skills that make them – and their colleagues – better at their jobs. We treat these the same as we would any new piece of code. Agents and skills run through the same security-scanning pipeline as any other code, so our AI governance function can focus on the policy and oversight questions that are genuinely new. We also apply the same least-privilege principle we use for people.
• Fighting AI With AI. Using AI means new vulnerabilities surface faster. We build and run our own security agents internally, the same way we’d expect any customer to, so our team can work at the pace threats now move. It’s a discipline we hold ourselves to, not just something we recommend to customers as best practice.

New Role of CISOs

The rise of AI has forced a rethinking of how CISOs approach their role. The job remains the same: protect the enterprise. How we do that, though, is changing. It requires greater flexibility to make the organization more productive while keeping data, systems, and people safe. That flexibility doesn’t mean becoming careless. But it does require creative solutions to make the organization more productive while keeping data, systems, and people safe.

That means governing at the speed at which employees create and share AI-related assets. The knee-jerk answer of “no” to business asks just doesn’t cut it anymore.

My advice is to become an active participant in business conversations. By proactively working with stakeholders to understand their needs, CISOs can protect initiatives as they are developed. They’re also more prepared to respond quickly when something needs to be addressed. A collaborative approach prevents the “cat and mouse” scenario that occurs when security teams try to retroactively manage or block projects that are already implemented.

So, lean in. Be involved at the ground level with how the business wants to use AI. That’s how security leaders can help their organizations move faster.

Learn more about how CISOs can better control and govern AI with our free guide, “Securing the Agentic Enterprise.”