Show Notes
Omar Santos is a Distinguished Engineer directing AI Security at Cisco. He’s here for a frank conversation about the realities of security in the agentic era. As more software is created on-the-fly by AI agents at the request of humans, security has to become an ever-present layer. Security will be built into complete agent runtime environments and will require constant human oversight and intervention, augmented by the ability to simulate outcomes to avoid risk.
Omar is also the Co-Chair of the Coalition for Secure AI, and these are the things he’s thinking about on a daily basis. He sits down with Robb and Josh at the end of a travel blitz that included work surrounding OpenAI’s Stargate Project, a four-year $500b plan for new AI infrastructure in the United States. The trio discuss how the ongoing training of models and the rising demand for inference continue to push the demand for security across burgeoning technology ecosystems.
---------- Support our show by supporting our sponsors!
This episode is supported by OneReach.ai — creators of Generative Studio X (GSX), the first complete AI Agent Runtime Environment (V1 circa 2019). Forged over a decade of R&D and proven in 10,000+ deployments, GSX lets enterprises design, build, and orchestrate secure, scalable AI agents and systems. Trusted across healthcare, finance, government, and telecom. Use any AI models Build and deploy intelligent agents fast Create guardrails for organizational alignment Enterprise-grade security and governance Avoid vendor lock-in.
Backed by UC Berkeley and recognized by Gartner. Before you build or buy another AI solution, think about getting an AI system.
Book a Demo: https://onereach.ai/book-a-demo/?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcast_s6e9&utm_content=1
---------- The revised and significantly updated second edition of our bestselling book about succeeding with AI agents, Age of Invisible Machines, is available everywhere: Amazon — https://bit.ly/4hwX0a5
Chapters - 00:00 - Intro and episode setup 00:33 - Meet Omar Santos and his role in AI security 01:00 - Security as the new programming 02:20 - Coalition for Secure AI and security as a new language 04:45 - Identity, access, and AI agents 06:09 - Scaling models and mega data centers 09:04 - Training vs inference and the compute explosion 12:54 - Budgets, compute, and hybrid human–AI security teams 15:16 - Checklists, guardrails, and spec-driven development 20:00 - From IDEs to agent swarms and background agents 25:19 - CodeGuard, rules for coding agents, and secure SDLC 32:00 - Why doing nothing is the biggest AI security risk 39:30 - Validating AI, AI safety levels, and open source dilemmas 46:00 - Private networks, insider AI agents, and embedded security 51:00 - Simulation, digital twins, and business-wide risk modeling
#InvisibleMachines #Podcast #TechPodcast #AIPodcast #AI #AgenticAI #AIAgents #DigitalTransformation #Cybersecurity #AIInfrastructure #AIOrchestration #AIManagement #TechLeadership #Innovation #ResponsibleAI #AIStandards #Cisco #OpenAI #StargateProject #AISecurity #Technology
More from Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine
For twenty-five years, Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie have been trying to give services the design quality people already expect from a product. Everybody knows what a designed BMW feels like. Almost nobody loves their bank, their hospital, or their mortgage. A product is the contract. A service is everything before it, during it, and after you are done, and it includes the relationships people do not aspire to: tax, a prison, a claim.
Three years after The Song of Significance, Seth Godin returns to Invisible Machines on the day his new book arrives, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. The compression of his body of work is now a sorting tool. Most stuckness is not a lack of information, it's an entanglement—two incompatible wants held at once. Effort doesn’t help. You stay stuck until you name the pin, pull it out, and loosen the knot.
The demo works. People start depending on it. Then one morning you have to explain yesterday's decision to someone who wasn't in the room.
Three years after his first Invisible Machines visit, Don Scheibenreif returns with a sharper read on the trough: everybody knows generative AI, almost nobody has answered what it does to the business model. He led Gartner’s Autonomous Business research, the successor to digital business, and co-authored When Machines Become Customers. The through-line is that AI is a tool, the harder question is how to create value with it.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that hits when you’re building with AI. You’ve got the license. You’ve got the pilot. You’ve got a chat window that generates whatever you ask for. But then comes the wall—the workflow that almost works, the dependency that loops back on itself, victories that only come when you quietly move the goalposts. In this episode, we talk about how to get around the wall.