
Show Notes
When the CTO, the CIO, and the CISO disagree about AI in the same room, the person who wins is rarely the person who is right. It is the one who can tie the decision to a business outcome, and who has earned enough trust that a no actually means no.
In this episode of The Blind Spot, Jason Lee sits down with Chad Lorenc, Global CSO, board director, and Security Practice Manager at AWS, to work out who actually owns AI and cyber risk. They cover why the CISO worth trusting is the one going about five over the speed limit rather than ten under, what broke between 2006 and 2014 that cloud migration never fixed, whether the chief AI officer is a real role or another hat on top of a hat, why nobody will ever buy least privilege, and the first question a board should ask about AI before it writes a policy. They also discuss the four CISO profiles, what a governance-only background costs a security leader, and how one negotiation with Visa bought years of credibility.
About the host Jason Lee is Managing Director at Z Cyber. For more than 20 years he has worked the part most people skip past: what happens after the risk is visible, across infrastructure, AI, and GRC.
About the guest Chad Lorenc is a Global CSO, board director, and Security Practice Manager at AWS. Across 25 years he has founded a startup, served as an early CISO for a regulated financial institution, built enterprise security and IT audit programs from scratch for a Fortune 500, deployed zero-trust architecture across three dozen countries, and now advises Fortune 500 security leaders on cloud and AI security strategy.
About Z Cyber Z Cyber is the security team that builds, runs, and improves your program through an Executive Security Advisor and Glance, its AI-native GRC platform.
Links Z Cyber: https://www.ztekcyber.com The Blind Spot: https://www.ztekcyber.com/resources/the-blind-spot Apply to be a guest: https://www.ztekcyber.com/resources/the-blind-spot/apply Get started with Z Cyber: https://www.ztekcyber.com/get-started
More from The Blind Spot
Most organizations believe they know where their sensitive data lives. That confidence often disappears as soon as they scan the environment. Files have been copied into personal folders, cloud storage, SaaS platforms, and systems that were never included in the original security plan. AI can now reach much of that data faster than teams can classify or govern it.
A point-in-time security assessment can be out of date the moment the report arrives. When new vulnerabilities can move from detection to exploitation in hours, the harder problem is no longer finding more. It is knowing which ones matter and fixing them fast enough.
A busy cybersecurity program is not necessarily a well-run one. The difference is whether the work protects the business, supports growth, and gives leaders confidence that the company can respond and recover when something goes wrong.
Security leaders often talk about risk. CFOs hear cost, trade-offs, timing, probability, and whether the decision can be defended to the CEO or the board.
Boards and CISOs are often on two different planes. In the first episode of The Blind Spot, Jason Lee sits down with Antonio Bovoso, cybersecurity executive and author of The Boardroom CISO, on why security and the board talk past each other and how to close the gap. They get into reframing risk as enablement, tying cyber to how the business actually makes money, cutting vanity metrics and the museum-quality deck, and where cyber liability really lands.