In the AI Risk Reward podcast, our host, Alec Crawford (@alec06830), Founder and CEO of Artificial Intelligence Risk, Inc. aicrisk.com , interviews guests about balancing the risk and reward of Artificial Intelligence for you, your business, and society as a whole. Podcast production and sound engineering by Troutman Street Audio. You can find them on LinkedIn.

In this deep dive episode, Alec speaks with Matthew Rosenquist, cybersecurity strategist and CISO, about how AI is rapidly reshaping both cyber defense and cyber offense. Matthew explains how new AI models are dramatically accelerating vulnerability discovery and exploit creation, putting pressure on traditional patching, risk management, and incident response processes. He also shares practical guidance for consumers and businesses on defending against AI-powered phishing, deepfakes, account compromise, and unsafe use of public AI tools. The conversation highlights why strong fundamentals like multi-factor authentication, least-privilege access, segmented data practices, and careful verification matter more than ever in an AI-driven threat landscape. Alec and Matthew close by exploring the emerging risks of agentic AI and MCP-connected systems, emphasizing that companies must adopt AI security controls with urgency, discipline, and realistic expectations.

Summary:

AI-Driven Vulnerabilities: Matthew discusses how advanced AI models can find and exploit software flaws far faster than traditional security processes can handle.
Consumer Cyber Hygiene: The episode stresses multi-factor authentication, account alerts, password discipline, and skepticism toward emails, texts, calls, and social media interactions.
Deepfakes and Social Engineering: AI is making scams more personalized, scalable, and convincing, which means users must verify before trusting.
Enterprise AI Risk: Companies need to be cautious with sensitive data in public AI tools and apply strong governance to internal AI deployments.
Agentic AI Security: Granting broad permissions to AI agents creates major new attack surfaces, making least-privilege design and access controls essential.

Referenced in this episode:

Companies/Organizations:

Verapath
Anthropic
Google
Western Union
Salesforce

Matthew Rosenquist on AI, Cyber Risk, and the Future of Defense